John Irving

American · born 1942

Born John Wallace Blunt junior on March 2, 1942, in Exeter, New Hampshire, the son of Helen Winslow and John Blunt senior, an Army Air Forces pilot whose marriage had ended before the pregnancy, he never met his biological father, who was shot down over Burma in 1943 and survived. His mother remarried Colin Irving, a teacher at Phillips Exeter Academy, who adopted the boy and gave him the name. He grew up on the Exeter campus, wrestled on the school team, took the sport with him into his life and his fiction, and studied at the University of New Hampshire and Vienna before earning his MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1967 under Kurt Vonnegut. His first three novels, Setting Free the Bears (1968), The Water-Method Man (1972), and The 158-Pound Marriage (1974), found small audiences. The World According to Garp (1978), the family saga of a wrestler turned novelist and his feminist mother, broke through to a vast readership and a 1982 film with Robin Williams. The Hotel New Hampshire (1981), The Cider House Rules (1985), an orphanage novel built around the question of abortion, and A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), with its tiny doomed protagonist with a wrecking voice, followed. He adapted Cider House for the screen and won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2000. A Widow for One Year (1998), The Fourth Hand (2001), Until I Find You (2005), Last Night in Twisted River (2009), and In One Person (2012) extended a fiction of ample, Dickensian scope. He divides his time between Toronto, where he holds Canadian citizenship, and a writing house in Vermont.