Donald Barthelme (April 7, 1931 - July 23, 1989) was an American author of short fiction and novels. He also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1961-1962), co-founder of Fiction (with Mark Mirsky and the assistance of Max and Marianne Frisch), and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of The University of Houston Creative Writing Program, a graduate fiction and poetry program which offers MFA and PhD degrees in writing. April 7 is the 97th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (98th in leap years). ... Year 1931 (MCMXXXI) was a common year starting on Thursday (link will display full 1931 calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... is the 204th day of the year (205th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1989 (MCMLXXXIX) was a common year starting on Sunday (link displays 1989 Gregorian calendar). ... Authorship redirects here. ... This article is in need of attention. ... A novel (from French nouvelle Italian novella, new) is an extended, generally fictional narrative, typically in prose. ... A Female Reporter A reporter is a type of journalist who researches and presents information in certain types of mass media. ... The Houston Post was a newspaper in Houston, Texas established on February 19, 1880, by Gail Borden Johnson. ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... “Houston” redirects here. ... Fiction is a popular magazine of international imaginative writing. ... Mark Jay Mirsky, is an American writer and professor of English at City College of New York. ... Max Frisch (May 15, 1911 – April 4, 1991), was a Swiss architect, playwright and novelist, one of the most representative writers of German literature after World War II. In his creative works Frisch paid particular attention to issues relating to problems of personal identity, morality and political commitment. ... The University of Houston Creative Writing Program is a graduate fiction and poetry program located in Houston, Texas. ...

Early life

Donald Barthelme was born in Philadelphia in 1931 to two students at the University of Pennsylvania. The family moved to Texas two years later, where Barthelme's father would become a professor of architecture at the University of Houston, where Barthelme would later major in journalism. In 1951, still a student, he wrote his first articles for the Houston Post. Barthelme was drafted into the Korean War in 1953, arriving in Korea on July 27, the very day the cease-fire ending the war was signed. He served briefly as the editor of an Army newspaper before returning to the U.S. and his job at the Houston Post. Once back, he continued his studies at the University of Houston, studying philosophy, but although he continued to take classes until 1957, he never received a degree. Nickname: City of Brotherly Love, Philly, the Quaker City Motto: Philadelphia maneto (Let brotherly love continue) Location in Pennsylvania Coordinates: Country United States State Pennsylvania County Philadelphia Founded October 27, 1682 Incorporated October 25, 1701 Mayor John F. Street (D) Area    - City 369. ... This article is about the private Ivy League university in Philadelphia. ... Official language(s) No official language See languages of Texas Capital Austin Largest city Houston Largest metro area Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex Area  Ranked 2nd  - Total 261,797 sq mi (678,051 km²)  - Width 773 miles (1,244 km)  - Length 790 miles (1,270 km)  - % water 2. ... The meaning of the word professor (Latin: one who claims publicly to be an expert) varies. ... This article is about building architecture. ... The University of Houston, formerly University of Houston–University Park, is a comprehensive doctoral degree-granting university[2] located in Houston, Texas. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Combatants United Nations:  Republic of Korea,  Australia,  Belgium,  Luxembourg,  Canada,  Colombia,  Ethiopia,  France,  Greece,  Luxembourg,  Netherlands,  New Zealand,  Philippines,  South Africa,  Thailand,  Turkey,  United Kingdom,  United States Medical staff:  Denmark,  Australia,  Italy,  Norway,  Sweden Communist states:  Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,  Peoples Republic of China,  Soviet Union Commanders... This article is about the Korean peninsula and civilization. ... is the 208th day of the year (209th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... An armistice is the effective end of a war, when the warring parties agree to stop fighting. ... The Army is the branch of the United States armed forces which has primary responsibility for land-based military operations. ... The philosopher Socrates about to take poison hemlock as ordered by the court. ...

Barthelme's relationship with his father was a struggle between a rebellious son and a demanding father. In later years they would have tremendous arguments about the kinds of literature in which Barthelme was interested and wrote. While in many ways his father was avant-garde in art and aesthetics, he did not approve of the post-modern and deconstruction schools. Barthelme's attitude toward his father is delineated in the novels The Dead Father and The King as he is pictured in the characters King Arthur and Lancelot. Barthelme's independence also shows in his moving away from the family's Roman Catholicism (his mother was especially devout), a separation that troubled Barthelme throughout his life as he did the distance with his father. He seemed much closer to his mother and agreeable to her strictures. A work similar to Marcel Duchamps Fountain Avant garde (written avant-garde) is a French phrase, one of many French phrases used by English speakers. ... Postmodernism (sometimes abbreviated pomo) is a term applied to a wide-ranging set of developments in critical theory, philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and culture, which are generally characterized as either emerging from, in reaction to, or superseding, modernism. ... Deconstruction is a term in contemporary philosophy, literary criticism, and the social sciences, denoting a process by which the texts and languages of Western philosophy (in particular) appear to shift and complicate in meaning when read in light of the assumptions and absences they reveal within themselves. ... A bronze Arthur in plate armour with visor raised and with jousting shield wearing Kastenbrust armour (early 15th century) by Peter Vischer, typical of later anachronistic depictions of Arthur. ... For other uses, see Lancelot (disambiguation). ... The Roman Catholic Church, most often spoken of simply as the Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with over one billion members. ...

First publications

In 1961, Barthelme became director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston; he published his first short story the same year. His New Yorker publication, "L'Lapse," followed in 1963. The magazine would go on to publish much of Barthelme's early output, including such now famous stories as "Me and Miss Mandible," the tale of a thirty-five-year-old sent to elementary school by a clerical error, and "A Shower of Gold," in which a sculptor agrees to appear on the existentialist game show Who Am I?. Barthelme collected his early stories the following year in Come Back, Dr. Caligari, for which he received considerable critical acclaim as an innovator of the short story form. His style spawned a number of imitators and would help to define the next several decades of short fiction. The New Yorker is an American magazine that publishes reportage, criticism, essays, cartoons, poetry and fiction. ... Also Nintendo emulator: 1964 (emulator). ...

Barthelme continued his success in the short story form with Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968). One widely anthologized story from this collection, "The Balloon," appears to reflect on Barthelme's own intentions as an artist. The narrator of the tale inflates a giant, irregular balloon over most of Manhattan, causing widely divergent reactions in the populace. Children play across its top, enjoying it quite literally on a surface level; adults attempt to read meaning into it, but are baffled by its ever-changing shape; the authorities attempt to destroy it, but fail. Only in the final paragraph does the reader learn that the narrator has inflated the balloon for purely personal reasons, and sees no intrinsic meaning in the balloon itself, a metaphor for the amorphous, uncertain nature of Barthelme's fiction. Other notable stories from this collection include "The Indian Uprising," a mad collage of a Comanche attack on a modern city, and "Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning," a series of vignettes showing the difficulties of truly knowing a public figure; the latter story appeared in print only two months before the real Kennedy's 1968 assassination. For other uses, see Manhattan (disambiguation). ... A collage composed of magazine articles and pictures Collage (From the French: , to stick) is regarded as a work of visual arts made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole. ... This article includes a list of works cited or a list of external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks in-text citations. ... Robert Francis Bobby Kennedy (November 20, 1925 – June 6, 1968), also called RFK, was one of two younger brothers of U.S. President John F. Kennedy and served as United States Attorney General from 1961 to 1964. ... Robert Kennedy United States Senator Robert F. Kennedy was fatally wounded by gunshots at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles at approximately 12:16 a. ...

Other works

Barthelme would go on to write over a hundred more short stories, collected first in City Life (1970), Sadness (1972), Amateurs (1976), Great Days (1979), Overnight to Many Distant Cities (1983), and the posthumous Teachings of Don B. (1992). Many of these stories were later reprinted and slightly revised for the collections Sixty Stories (1981) and Forty Stories (1987). Though primarily known for these stories, Barthelme also produced four novels characterized by the same fragmentary style: Snow White (1967), The Dead Father (1975), Paradise (1986), and The King (1990, posthumous).

Barthelme also wrote the non-fiction Guilty Pleasures (1974) and the collection Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme. With his daughter, he wrote the children's book The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine, and received the National Book Award for Children's Literature in 1972 for this effort. He was also a director of PEN and the Author's Guild, and a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. The National Book Awards is one of the most preeminent literary prizes in the United States. ... Logo of International PEN International PEN, the worldwide association of writers, was founded in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere; to emphasise the role of literature in the development of mutual understanding and world culture; to fight for freedom of expression; and to act as... The American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters was formed in 1976 from the merger of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, which was founded in 1898, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which was founded in 1904. ...

Later life and death

Barthelme went on to teach for brief periods at Boston University, University at Buffalo, and the College of the City of New York, where he served as Distinguished Visiting Professor from 1974-75. He married four times. His second wife, Helen Barthelme, later wrote a biography entitled Donald Barthelme: The Genesis of a Cool Sound, published in 2001. With his third wife Birgit, a Dane, he had his first child, a daughter named Anne, and near the end of his life he married Marion, with whom he had his second daughter, Kate. Marion and Donald remained wed until his 1989 death from cancer. Donald Barthelme's brothers Frederick (1943 - ) and Steven (1947- ) are also respected fiction writers and teachers at the University of Southern Mississippi. Frederick was also briefly the drummer for the psychedelic rock group, the Red Krayola. For similarly-named academic institutions, see Boston (disambiguation). ... University at Buffalo, The State University of New York (also known as University at Buffalo, SUNY Buffalo or simply UB) is a coeducational public research university, which has multiple campuses located in Buffalo and Amherst, New York, USA. Offering 84 bachelors, 184 masters and 78 doctoral degrees, it... The College of the City of New York was: The former name of the City College of New York The former name of the City University of New York This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... Cancer is a class of diseases or disorders characterized by uncontrolled division of cells and the ability of these to spread, either by direct growth into adjacent tissue through invasion, or by implantation into distant sites by metastasis (where cancer cells are transported through the bloodstream or lymphatic system). ... Fredrick Barthelme (October 10, 1943 -) is an American author of short fiction and novels and a professor at the University of Southern Mississippi. ... Steven Barthelme is the author of numerous short stories and essays. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... The Red Crayola was a psychedelic, avant-garde rock band from Austin, Texas in the late 1960s made up of art students and led by singer/guitarist and visual artist Mayo Thompson. ...

Style and legacy

Barthelme's short stories are often exceptionally compact (a form sometimes called "short-short story," "flash fiction," or "sudden fiction"), often focusing only on incident rather than complete narratives. (He did, however, write some longer stories with more traditional narrative arcs.) At first, these stories contained short epiphanic moments. Later in his career, the stories were not consciously philosophical or symbolic. His fiction had its admirers and detractors, being hailed as profoundly disciplined or derided as meaningless and academic postmodernism. Barthelme's thoughts and work were largely the result of twentieth-century angst as he read extensively, for example in Pascal, Husserl, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Ionesco, Becket, Sartre, and Camus. // Flash fiction is fiction characterized by its extreme brevity, as measured by its length in words. ... This article is about a feeling, for other meanings see epiphany (disambiguation). ...

Barthelme's stories typically avoid traditional plot structures, relying instead on a steady acculumation of seemingly-unrelated detail. By subverting the reader's expectations through constant non sequiturs, Barthelme creates a hopelessly fragmented verbal collage reminiscent of such modernist works as T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and James Joyce's Ulysses, whose linguistic experiments he often challenged. Certain parallels have also been drawn between Barthelme and Franz Kafka. However, Barthelme's fundamental skepticism and irony distanced him from the modernist's belief in the power of art to reconstruct society, leading most critics to class him as a postmodernist writer. Literary critics have noted that Barthelme, like the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, whom he admired, plays with the meanings of words, relying on poetic intuition to spark new connections of ideas buried in the expressions and conventional responses. The critic George Wicks called Barthelme "the leading American practitioner of surrealism today . . . whose fiction continues the investigations of consciousness and experiments in expression that began with Dada and surrealism a half century ago." Barthelme has been described in many other ways, such as in an article in Harper's where Josephine Henden classified him as an angry sado-masochist. This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ... For Christian theological modernism, see Liberal Christianity and Modernism (Roman Catholicism). ... Thomas Stearns Eliot (September 26, 1888 - January 4, 1965), was a major Modernist Anglo-American poet, dramatist, and literary critic. ... The Waste Land (1922), sometimes mistakenly written as The Wasteland, is a highly influential 434-line modernist poem by T. S. Eliot. ... James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (Irish Séamus Seoighe; 2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish expatriate writer, widely considered to be one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. ... Ulysses is a novel by James Joyce, first serialized in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on February 2, 1922, in Paris. ... Kafka at the age of five Franz Kafka (IPA: ) (July 3, 1883 – June 3, 1924) was one of the major German-language fiction writers of the 20th century. ... Irony is a literary or rhetorical device, in which there is a gap or incongruity between what a speaker or a writer says and what is generally understood (either at the time, or in the later context of history). ... The term Postmodernism (sometimes abbreviated Pomo[1]) was a reaction to modernism (not post in the purely temporal sense of after). Largely influenced by the disillusionment induced by the Second World War, postmodernism tends to refer to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic state lacking a clear central hierarchy or organizing... Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé by Édouard Manet. ...

The great bulk of his work was published in The New Yorker, and he began to publish his stories in collections beginning with Come Back, Dr. Caligari in 1964, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts in 1968, and City Life in 1970. Time magazine named City Life one of the best books of the year and described the collection as written with "Kafka's purity of language and some of Beckett's grim humor." At times it seems that every story Barthelme published was unique, such is his formal originality: for example, a fresh handling of the parodic dramatic monologue in "The School" or a list of 100 numbered sentences and fragments in "The Glass Mountain." Barthelme once wrote, "Fragments are the only forms I trust" ("See the Moon?" from Unspeakable Practices: in fact, statement appears several times in that story), an aspect of his writing which Joyce Carol Oates commented on in the New York Times Book Review essay of 1972 entitled "Whose Side Are You On?": "This from a writer of arguable genius whose works reflect what he himself must feel, in book after book, that his brain is all fragments . . . just like everything else."

Barthelme's legacy as an educator lives on at the University of Houston, where he was one of the founders of the prestigious Creative Writing Program. At the University of Houston, Barthelme became known as a sensitive, creative, and encouraging mentor to young creative-writing students while he continued his own writings. The University of Houston, formerly University of Houston–University Park, is a comprehensive doctoral degree-granting university[2] located in Houston, Texas. ...

An upcoming 2007 issue of McSweeney's Quarterly will include a special section on Barthelme, including previously uncollected early writings and remembrances by Ann Beattie, David Gates, and Oscar Hijuelos. Timothy McSweeneys Quarterly Concern is a semi-quarterly literary journal published by the McSweeneys publishing house. ... Ann Beattie (born September 8, 1947) is an American short story writer and novelist. ... David Gates (born January 8, 1947) is an American journalist and novelist. ... Oscar Hijuelos (born 1951) is an American novelist. ...

Bibliography

Story Collections

• Come Back, Dr. Caligari Little, Brown (Boston), 1964.
• Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts Farrar, Straus (New York City), 1968.
• City Life Farrar, Straus, 1970.
• Sadness Farrar, Straus, 1972.
• Guilty Pleasures Farrar, Straus, 1974.
• Amateurs Farrar, Straus, 1976.
• Great Days Farrar, Straus, 1979.
• Sixty Stories, Putnam (New York City), 1981.
• Overnight to Many Distant Cities Putnam, 1983.
• Sam's Bar, Doubleday (New York City), 1987.
• Forty Stories, Putnam, 1987.
• Flying to America: 45 More Stories, Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007.
• The Baby, Putnam, 1987.

His short story Game was published in the anthology The War Book (edited by James Sallis, 1969). Forty Stories collects forty of Donald Barthelmes short stories, several of which originally appeared in The New Yorker. ... James Sallis (born 21 December 1944 in Helena, Arkansas) is an author, musician, and respiratory therapist best known for his series of crime novels featuring the character Lew Griffin and set in New Orleans, LA. ...

Novels

• Snow White Atheneum (New York City), 1967.
• The Dead Father Farrar, Straus, 1975.
• Paradise Putnam, 1986.
• The King, Harper (New York City), 1990.

Misc

• "The Piano Player" and a conversation with the author in "New sounds in American fiction" editor Gordon Lish (1969)
• The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine or the Hithering Thithering Djinn (children's book), Farrar, Straus, 1971.
• Great Days (play; based on his story of the same title), first produced off-Broadway at American Place Theater, 1983.
• The Teachings of Don B.: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories and Plays of Donald Barthelme, edited by Kim Herzinger, Turtle Bay Books (New York City), 1992.
• Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme, Random House (New York City), 1997.

Gordon Jay Lish (born February 11, 1934 in Hewlett, New York) is an American writer. ... Gordon Jay Lish (born February 11, 1934 in Hewlett, New York) is an American writer. ...

Awards

• Guggenheim fellowship, 1966
• Time Magazine Best Books of the Year list, 1971, for City Life
• National Book Award for children's literature, 1972, for The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine or the Hithering Thithering Djinn
• Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, 1972
• Jesse H Jones Award from Texas Institute of Letters, 1976, for The Dead Father
• Nominated for National Book Critics Circle Award, PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, all for Sixty Stories, all in 1982
• Rea Award for the Short Story, 1988

Guggenheim can be a reference to any of a number of members or interests of the Meyer Guggenheim family, including: Meyer Guggenheim, or his descendants: Guggenheim family; The Guggenheim Museums; foundations such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (see also Guggenheim Fellowship), and the Harry... (Clockwise from upper left) Time magazine covers from May 7, 1945; July 25, 1969; December 31, 1999; September 14, 2001; and April 21, 2003. ... The PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction is awarded annually by the PEN/Faulkner Foundation to the author of the best American work of fiction that year. ... The Rea Award for the Short Story is an annual award given to an American author chosen for unusually significant contributions to American short story fiction. ...

External links

• Jessamyn's Barthelme page includes over a dozen Barthelme stories, reprinted by permission, along with biographical information and links
• The Scriptorium's Barthelme page discusses his life and work
• A Donald Barthelme Collection
• don b's Snow White: a play created by Rude Mechanicals in Austin, Texas (1999)
• Cold Bacon Page on the writer and his forms
• Literary History's bibliography of the author
• Barthelme theme for WordPress inspired by the author's story Margins