Have you ever read a story by Donald Barthelme? The odds are you haven’t; Jacob Appel (a literary critic) described him in 2010 as “the most influential unread author in United States history.”
Barthelme was born April 7, 1931, and died pretty young at 58 in 1989. He published more than a hundred short stories, four novels, and some other works, both fiction and non. He published more stories in The New Yorker than anywhere else, but that doesn’t mean they were “mainstream fiction.” They aren’t — I haven’t read a huge number of them, but what I’ve read doesn’t generally have a plot, and can be hard to follow. For me, at least.
What his writing is great at is the language itself; there’s wordplay and what seem to me like jokes all over the place. Another critic, George Wicks, called his work “surrealism.” His stories sometimes seem like lists (well, some of them, like The Glass Mountain, are exactly like lists) that you have to extract your own meaning from. Writer Joyce Carol Oates said “…he must feel…that his brain is all fragments…”, and Barthelme himself has his narrator say, in See the Moon? “Fragments are the only forms I trust.” He also, though, pointed out that he was not the one who said that; it was the narrator in his story.
Barthelme was born in Philadelphia, and the family moved to Texas when he was two. His father was professor of architecture at the University of Houston, which Barthelme later attended to study journalism. In 1953 left school when he was drafted into the Army, which at the time was fighting the Korean War. He didn’t do any fighting himself; he arrived in Korea the very day the war ended. He served as the editor of the Army newspaper and worked for their Public Information Office. Then he went back to the University when he got home, but switched majors to philosophy. By 1957 he finally quit school without graduating. Even without a degree, he later taught at Boston University, the University of Buffalo, and the City College of New York. His two younger brothers, Frederick and Stephen, both became writers as well.
Barthelme had published a lot of newspaper articles by 1961, when he published his first short story. Two years later he got his first publication in The New Yorker. The story was L’Lapse, a parody of a 1963 French film, L’Eclisse. His early stories often placed a character — sometimes one familiar to readers — in a ridiculous situation. He even wrote one inspired by Batman: it was called The Joker’s Greatest Triumph. Loads of other writers copied this approach, and it’s one of the reasons why he’s considered so influential.
Barthelme also founded the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston, in 1980. That program is still operating, and is one of the most prestigious such programs in the US. Students who were taught directly by Barthelme described him as a creative and encouraging mentor. He won the National Book Award for his children’s book The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine. He also won awards from Time magazine, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Texas Institute of Letters, the National Book Critics, and he won the Rea Award for the Short Story in 1988. His biography, Hiding Man, by Tracy Daugherty, was published in 2009.
