Donald Barthelme
Donald BarthelmeDonald Barthelme
Donald Barthelme has been called "probably the most perversely gifted writer in the U.S." As well as " one of the best, most significant and carefully developing young American writers" (Harte and Riley, 41). He was born April 7, 1931 to Donald and Helen Barthelme in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Barthelme had a wide range of careers during his lifetime. He worked as a newspaper reporter and as a managing editor of Location, and art and literature review (Harte and Riley, 41). His other jobs included serving in Korea and Japan in the U.S. Army (Barthelme Bio, 1), Professor of English at the City University of New York, teacher of Creative Writing at the University of Texas in Houston, and of course author of short stories and novels (Anderson et al, 919). He is the author of a number of collections of short stories including "Come Back, Dr. Caligari" (1964); "Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts" (1968); " City Life" (1971); "Sadness" (1972); "Great Days" (1978); "Overnight to Many Distant Cities" (1983); and "Paradise" (1986). He also wrote Snow White, a parody of the popular children�s fairy tale, the novel. He won the National Book Award for Children�s literature for the book titled "The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine: or, the Hithering, Thithering, Djinn" (1971) (Marowski and Matuz, 3?). In 1976 he received the Jesse H. Jones Award from the Texas Institute of Letters for his book The Dead Father. His book Sixty Stories was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner award for Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize all in 1982. Barthelme also had the privilege of being widely regarded as one of the ablest and most versatile American stylists (Robert et al, 919). Donald Barthelme passed away July 23, 1989 from cancer in Houston Texas.
According to the Literature book Barthelme�s stories contain plots that are "unconventional episodic, a clutter of styles, absurdities, and slapstick." In his hands, "a myth is likely to turn into realism, and realism into absurdity." It is said that Barthelme�s characters are "two-dimensional parodies of themselves, rather than fully developed individuals."
To get a feel for what the way Donald Barthelme writes I read a few of his short stories. Barthelme is a "writer of experimental fiction who creates funny and disturbing stories by putting different parts of stories that are seemingly unimportant to one another together"(Marowski and Matuz, 34). Anatole Broyard says", Barthelme is so funny that most readers will never know how serious he is" (Harte and Riley, 41). I do not agree with either of these people that Barthelme is funny. I do agree thought that he does seem to be a very serious writer. Thomas Leitch says about Barthelme:
"Perhaps the most striking feature of Donald Barthelme�s fiction is the number of things it get along without. In Barthelme�s fictive world, there appear to be no...
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