General Analysis Of John Irvings Works :: essays research papers

derriere Winslow Irving stands out as one of the finest contemporary American authors. Born in Exeter, New Hampshire in July 1942, Irving attended an Exeter prep school at which his stepfather taught history. Although he excelled at English, he was discour come ond by the fact that he was dyslexic, a condition which wasnt recognized back then and so had trouble holding up. An avid wrestler, he attended the University of New Hampshire on a grapple scholarship. There, he met a young Southern novelist named John Yount, who encouraged him to write. "It was so simple," he remembers. "Yount was he first person to point out that anything I did except writing was going to be vaguely unsatisfying." Similarly stir by Dickens work, particularly A Christmas Carol, and studying under Gnter spy in Vienna, Irving began to write what would later become his first novel, Setting apologise the Bears (Irving, 1968). When he returned from Austria he married, and when his first chil d was born at age 23, he sold his 750 cc Royal Enfield- duly noted in Bears- and continued to write.Following the scant success of Bears, Irving wrote The Water Method world in 1972, the story of a perpetual graduate student who cant seem to take anything to completion. Although it was criticized for lack of depth and character development, it incorporates an interesting shifting recital and alternating time periods, which makes the book seem less traditional. Like Bears, twain books contain mild autobiographical information. Fred- the implied narrator of the book- attended Exeter, studied in Vienna, and has a wrestling background. In 1978, he published The World gibe to Garp, which was instantly a success and made Irving a literary adept overnight. It is the story of "TS Garp, the bastard son of Jenny Fields, a feminist attracter ahead of her times. Theirs is a world of sexual extremes and even sexual assassinations. hitherto the dark, violent events of the story do not undermine a harlequinade both ribald and robust ." TS Garp, a wrestler and writer, has to deal with his mothers intumescence in the feminist movement (though Jenny Fields herself was loath to call option herself a feminist). Garp also contains characteristics that seem to earmark works of Irving unfortunate accidents, wrestling, inscrutable subplots, an intricate cast of characters, and a humor that mocks things that are traditionally weighty and tragic. There is something to be said about Irvings talents that he can become humor of such tragedy, as in the terrible car accident, and not seem crass or dark.