Yesterday marked the birthday of one of the twentieth century’s most controversial literary authors, John Gardner. Gardner produced more than thirty works of fiction and nonfiction, consisting of novels, children’s stories, literary criticism, and a book of poetry. His books, which include the celebrated novels Grendel, The Sunlight Dialogues, andOctober Light, are noted for their complexity and insightful glimpse into human nature.
Gardner (pictured at left in the early 1980s) was born in Batavia, New York. His father, a preacher and dairy farmer, and mother, an English teacher, both possessed a love of literature and often recited Shakespeare during his childhood. When he was eleven years old, Gardner was involved in a tractor accident that resulted in the death of his younger brother, Gilbert. He carried the guilt from this accident with him for the rest of his life, and would incorporate this theme into a number of his works, among them the short story “Redemption” (1977).
Gardner married his first wife, Joan Louise Patterson, in 1953, and earned his master’s and PhD in English from the University of Iowa in 1958. He then entered into a career in academia that would last for the remainder of his life.
In 1966, Gardner published his first novel, The Resurrection, followed by The Wreckage of Agathonin 1970. However, It wasn’t until the release of Grendel,in 1971, that Gardner’s work began attracting significant attention. Praise for Grendel was universal and the book left Gardner with a devoted following. His reputation as a preeminent figure in modern American literature was confirmed upon the release of his New York Times bestselling novel The Sunlight Dialogues (1972).
Throughout the 1970s, Gardner completed about two books per year, including October Light (1976), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the controversial On Moral Fiction (1978), a work of literary criticism in which he argued that “true art is by its nature moral” and criticized such contemporaries as John Updike and John Barth.
In the last years of his life, Gardner became much more interested in politics than in literature, declaring at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1982 that “if you’re not writing politically, you’re not writing.”
In 1980, Gardner married his second wife, a former student of his named Liz Rosenberg. The couple divorced in 1982, and that same year he became engaged to Susan Thornton, another former student. One week before they were to be married, Gardner died in a motorcycle crash in Pennsylvania. He was forty-nine years old.