Donald Barthelme (1931–1989)
Author of Sixty Stories
About the Author
Donald Barthelme was born on April 7, 1931, and was one of the major U.S. short story writers and novelists of the late twentieth century. Barthelme satirized American life. Born in Philadelphia, Barthelme spent part of his early life in Houston, Texas, and began to write fiction while working as a show more journalist, director of an art museum and university publicist. These occupations became fuel for his creative fire. His arsenal of techniques included parodies of television shows, radio plays and recipes, long and elaborate metaphors, complex dream sequences, and a break-neck narrative pace. After the publication of his first collection, Come Back Dr. Caligari (1964), Barthelme became a full-time writer of short stories and novels. The latter included Snow White (1967), The Dead Father (1975), and Paradise (1986). Barthelme also published three more short story collections, 60 Stories (1981), Overnight to Many Distant Cities (1983), and 40 Stories (1987). Barthelme died of cancer in 1989. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Photo Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries
Works by Donald Barthelme
The Teachings of Don B.: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme (1992) 209 copies
Game 5 copies
The Indian Uprising [short story] 4 copies
Concerning the Bodyguard 3 copies
The Photographs 2 copies
Paraguay 2 copies
The Genius {short story} 2 copies
[No title] 1 copy
Amateurs 1 copy
Paraíso (Sleeples nights) 1 copy
VUELVE, Dr CALIGARI 1 copy
Shower of Gold 1 copy
Views of My Father Weeping 1 copy
Barthelme Donald 1 copy
Zombies 1 copy
Glass Mountain {short story} 1 copy
Tavatud kombed, koletud teod 1 copy
روی پله های کنسرواتوار 1 copy
Regele 1 copy
Swallowing 1 copy
The King 1 copy
Associated Works
The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction: Fifty North American American Stories Since 1970 (1999) — Contributor — 516 copies
You've Got to Read This: Contemporary American Writers Introduce Stories that Held Them in Awe (1994) — Contributor — 380 copies
McSweeney's Issue 24 (McSweeney's Quarterly Concern): Trouble/Come Back, Donald Barthelme (2007) — Contributor — 280 copies
The 50 Funniest American Writers: An Anthology of Humor from Mark Twain to The Onion (2011) — Contributor — 247 copies
Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story (2012) — Contributor — 221 copies
The Vintage Book of Amnesia: An Anthology of Writing on the Subject of Memory Loss (2000) — Contributor — 217 copies
The Graphic Canon, Vol. 3: From Heart of Darkness to Hemingway to Infinite Jest (2013) — Contributor — 148 copies
Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, "Found" Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts (2012) — Contributor — 67 copies
The New Mystery: The International Association of Crime Writers' Essential Crime Writing of the Late 20th Century (1993) — Contributor — 62 copies
Selected Shorts: American Classics (Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story) (2010) — Contributor — 24 copies
Selected Shorts: A Touch of Magic (Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story) (2009) — Contributor — 17 copies
Fifty Years of the American Short Story from the O. Henry Awards 1919-1970 (1970) — Contributor — 13 copies
Fifty Years of the American Short Story: from the O. Henry Awards 1919-1970 (Volume I) (1970) — Contributor — 3 copies
Fiction, Volume 1, Number 1 — Contributor — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Barthelme, Donald
- Birthdate
- 1931-04-07
- Date of death
- 1989-07-23
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
- Place of death
- Houston, Texas, USA
- Places of residence
- New York, New York, USA
- Education
- University of Houston
- Occupations
- curator (Houston Museum of Contemporary Art)
writer
author - Relationships
- Barthelme, Frederick (brother)
Barthelme, Steven (brother) - Organizations
- American Academy of Arts and Letters (Literature, 1978)
- Short biography
- Donald Barthelme was born in 1931 in Philadelphia. He was a longtime contributor to The New Yorker, winner of a National Book Award, a director of PEN and the Author's Guild, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His sixteen books -- including Snow White, The Dead Father, and City Life -- substantially redefined American short fiction for our time. In 1972 he won the National Book Award for children's literature for The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine of the Hithering Thithering Djinn. He died in 1989.
Members
Reviews
I love Barthelme's shorter works, but I didn't enjoy this one at all, and and abandoned it after about fifty pages. To me, his writing style, so laden with irony, didn't suit the longer form. Such a constant barrage of irony on so many levels just left me alienated and failing to care. Maybe one day I'll come back to this and see what it has to offer.
This collection is full of experimentation and humor and probably some deep thoughts that I totally missed, and I'm glad it exists for whoever the receptive audience is.
Perhaps one of the most pointless books I've ever read: a short piece of absurdist humour without the humour and with the absurdism being completely inert. Splayed rather than pointed in its motives, Donald Barthelme's The King makes no use of its interesting concept; that of King Arthur and his knights being present in Britain during the Second World War.
It's a struggle to determine what the point was of such a move: we must assume the idea came to Barthelme from the old legend that the Once and Future King will return to aid Britain in its hour of gravest need – and could there be any time of need more appropriate than 1940? However, aside from a few token and desultory name drops of Dunkirk and the Blitz, there's no attempt at all to utilise the World War Two potential, and the Arthurian court are about as relevant and essential to their new wartime setting as Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are to the proper functioning of the original Hamlet. Launcelot and Guinevere aren't dead here, however. Just limp.
It's hard to pin down what the writer was trying to do, if indeed he was trying to do anything. At one point I thought perhaps the anachronism of having King Arthur in the modern age was meant to be a commentary on the purported anachronism of monarchy in the modern age, but this idea was dropped in the text the instant it was raised. As too was the idea – perhaps Barthelme's only good one – of the quest for the Holy Grail being replaced by the quest to develop the first atomic bomb.
These were the only two signposts I could find in the author's inoffensive but empty meander of a book – though not so much signposts as broken twigs indicating that something, who knows what, had passed by. The King is just yet another of those books which seems determined to confirm 'post-modern' as a synonym for 'tedious, self-satisfied noodling'. Sometimes taking a risk on a promising book just doesn't pay off. It happens.… (more)
It's a struggle to determine what the point was of such a move: we must assume the idea came to Barthelme from the old legend that the Once and Future King will return to aid Britain in its hour of gravest need – and could there be any time of need more appropriate than 1940? However, aside from a few token and desultory name drops of Dunkirk and the Blitz, there's no attempt at all to utilise the World War Two potential, and the Arthurian court are about as relevant and essential to their new wartime setting as Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are to the proper functioning of the original Hamlet. Launcelot and Guinevere aren't dead here, however. Just limp.
It's hard to pin down what the writer was trying to do, if indeed he was trying to do anything. At one point I thought perhaps the anachronism of having King Arthur in the modern age was meant to be a commentary on the purported anachronism of monarchy in the modern age, but this idea was dropped in the text the instant it was raised. As too was the idea – perhaps Barthelme's only good one – of the quest for the Holy Grail being replaced by the quest to develop the first atomic bomb.
These were the only two signposts I could find in the author's inoffensive but empty meander of a book – though not so much signposts as broken twigs indicating that something, who knows what, had passed by. The King is just yet another of those books which seems determined to confirm 'post-modern' as a synonym for 'tedious, self-satisfied noodling'. Sometimes taking a risk on a promising book just doesn't pay off. It happens.… (more)
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- Works
- 73
- Also by
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- Rating
- 3.8
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- 105
- ISBNs
- 154
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- Favorited
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and some are good like the new owner which is about how landlords are bad… (more)