He is on record, however, as having enjoyed the film. Irving insisted that the title and character names be changed because the screenplay was "markedly different" from the novel. That book, too, was later adapted to film: the 1998 Simon Birch. Owen Meany was Irving's best selling book since Garp and, today, remains on many high school reading lists. The novel was influenced by Gunter Grass's 1959 The Tin Drum, and contains allusions to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and works of Dickens. In 1989, four years after publishing Cider House, Irving came out with A Prayer for Owen Meany, also set in a New England boarding school (and Toronto). It was nominated for several Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and earned Irving an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. It took Irving nearly 10 years to develop the screenplay for Cider House, and the film-starring Michael Caine, Tobey Maguire, and Charlize Theron-was released in 1998. Many drew parallels between the novel and Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist (1838). An epic set in a Maine orphanage, the novel's central topic is abortion. In 1985, Irving published The Cider House Rules. Henry Award for "Interior Space," a short story published in Fiction magazine in 1980. It, too, was adapted to film, starring Jodie Foster, Rob Lowe, and Beau Bridges. The next was The Hotel New Hampshire (1981), which sold well despite mixed reviews from critics. Garp transformed Irving from an obscure, academic literary writer to a household name, and his subsequent books were bestsellers. Irving makes a brief cameo in the film as an official in one of Garp's high school wrestling matches. The film version of Garp came out in 1982 with Robin Williams in the title role and Glenn Close as his mother it garnered several Academy Award nominations, including nominations for Close and John Lithgow. It was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 1979 but won the award the following year when the paperback edition was issued. Dutton made a strong commitment to his new novel- The World According to Garp (1978), and the book became an international bestseller and cultural phenomenon. In 1975, Irving accepted a position as assistant professor of English at Mount Holyoke College.įrustrated at the lack of promotion his novels were receiving from Random House, his first publisher, Irving moved to Dutton. His second and third novels, The Water-Method Man (1972) and The 158-Pound Marriage (1974), were similarly received. In the late 1960s, he studied with Kurt Vonnegut at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. The book was reasonably well reviewed but failed to gain a large readership. Irving's published his first novel, Setting Free the Bears (1968) when he was only 26. He never met has father, however, even though on occasion Blunt attended his son's wrestling competitions. Irving learned of his father's heroism only in 1981 and incorporated the incident into The Cider House Rules. Irving's biological father, a World War II pilot, was shot down over Burma in 1943, although he survived. Wrestling features prominently in his books, stories, and life. Irving attended Phillips Exeter and participated in school wrestling program, both as a student athlete and as assistant coach. The couple parted during pregnancy, and Irving grew as the stepson of a Phillips Exeter Academy faculty member, Colin Franklin Newell Irving (as well as the nephew of another faculty member, H. in Exeter, New Hampshire, the son of Helen Frances (nee Winslow) and John Wallace Blunt, Sr., a writer and executive recruiter. He won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1999 for his script The Cider House Rules. A number of of his novels, such as The Cider House Rules (1985), A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), and A Widow for One Year (1998), have been bestsellers. Irving achieved critical and popular acclaim in 1978 after the international success of The World According to Garp in 1978. John Irving is an American novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter. Awards-American Book Award ( Garp) Academy Award Best Screenplay ( Cider House).Education-B.A., University of New Hampshire M.F.A., Iowa Writers' Workshop.The 1999 film version stars Michael Caine, Tobey Maguire, Charlize Theron. Larch's favorite orphan, Homer Wells, who is never adopted. Wilbur Larch-saint and obstetrician, founder and director of the orphanage in the town of St. Set in rural Maine in the first half of this century, it tells the story of Dr. The Cider House Rules is John Irving's sixth novel.
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