Novelist and short-story writer, born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. He worked as a journalist and magazine editor before turning to fiction. Associated with the avant-garde movement of the 1960s, he was an experimentalist who rejected the traditions of the conventional novel form, as seen in Snow White (1967), The Dead Father (1975), and Paradise (1986). He also published many short stories.
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. 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.
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 kind of literature Barthelme was interested in and wrote. 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 cleavage that bothered Barthelme throughout his life just as did the cleavage with his father. Having essentially an existential outlook, Barthelme looked hard at life and found much wanting, thus developing a sad, satiric outlook.
First publications
In 1961, Barthelme became director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston; 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.
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. 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 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). 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.
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. Donald Barthelme's brothers Frederick (1943 - ) and Steven (1947- ) are also respected fiction writers and teachers at the University of Southern Mississippi. Donald Barthelme of orchestrating the 1986 attack on Dan Rather, citing unusual passages in Barthelme's writing, including the phrase "What is the frequency?", a recurring character named Kenneth, and a short story about a pompous editor named Lather.
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. 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.
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. 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 . 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.
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, a wonderful and characteristically insightful collection. 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, "The only forms I trust are fragments," an aspect of his writing which Joyce Carol Oates attacked 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 .
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 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.
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