A vastly prolific author of thirty-five books in a career spanning only twenty-five years, John Gardner penned novels, criticism, short stories, works for young readers, a biography of Chaucer, plays,...
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John Champlin Gardner, Jr., novelist, epic poet, and scholar, was born in Batavia, New York, on 21 July 1933 to John Champlin and Priscilla Jones Gardner. As a boy he lived in Batavia, attended the lo...
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Critical Essay by Susan Strehle
[The Resurrection and Nickel Mountain, two novels from the "very early" phase of Gardner's career,] resemble each other in several ways. They share...
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Critical Essay by Judy Smith Murr
The best key, although a reductive one, to John Gardner's fiction is the narrator's question in Jason and Medeia: "Is nothing serious?" In...
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Critical Essay by Stephen J. Laut, S.j.
[In The Life and Times of Chaucer Gardner] shows both his scholarship and his imaginative talent. Many external facts about Chaucer's life are available;...
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Critical Essay by Jay L. Halio
[October Light is a] strange but often beautiful and touching account of two lonely, elderly people, caught up in their memories, their convictions, and their prejudices...
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Critical Essay by Webster Schott
In On Moral Fiction Gardner pronounces virtually all contemporary art defective. To correct the situation he gives us this "attempt to develop a set of instruct...
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Critical Essay by Marc Granetz
Freddy's Book is profoundly dissatisfying. I came to it as a great admirer of John Gardner's previous fiction—Grendel, October Light, the tales in T...
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Critical Essay by Marilyn Arnold
In a recent essay, [John Gardner] deplores the "shoddy morality of much of our fiction" and insists that "instruction is art's most basic f...
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Critical Essay by Robert Richman
[Freddy's Book] is a well-written, persuasive, philosophically dramatic, and concise work in which Gardner brings into explicit, exciting battle the debilitatin...
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Critical Essay by Christopher Lehmann-haupt
"Freddy's Book," John Gardner's eighth novel, begins as a conventional horror story, with the familiar Gothic appurtenances. At ...
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Critical Essay by Ursula K. Le Guin
Going strictly by internal evidence one might suppose Freddy's Book to be the work of the offspring of an illicit but delightful union between Ingmar Bergman...
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Critical Essay by John Romano
It is the interesting fate of "Freddy's Book" to follow John Gardner's critical essay "On Moral Fiction" on the ever-longer shel...
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Critical Essay by Thomas Leclair
[The subjects of the debate between Lars-Goren and Brask in Freddy's Book]—art and language—are an authorial intrusion that spoils this book and p...
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Critical Essay by Julian Moynahan
Most of the 10 stories in John Gardner's new collection ["The Art of Living and Other Stories"] develop the common theme of art and its vexed rel...
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Critical Essay by Douglas Hill
There are 10 pieces in [The Art of Living], in diverse modes—gothic folktale and fantasy, down-home rural comedy, evocative memoirs of childhood and adolescence i...
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Critical Essay by Bruce Allen
If the author of such basically dissimilar books as "Grendel," "October Light," and that curmudgeonly manifesto "On Moral Fiction...
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Critical Essay by Kent Thompson
Arnold Deller is a practitioner of the most ephemeral of the arts. He is a cook. But because he is an artist, he knows that an artistic response is fitting when his son...
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Critical Essay by Robert R. Harris
It is a good bet that John Gardner enjoys writing his novels far more than the public enjoys reading them. Mickelsson's Ghosts is dreadfully long and padded, ...
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Critical Essay by Anatole Broyard
There are different ways of enjoying a book. For most of "Mickelsson's Ghosts," John Gardner's new novel. I felt like sprawling out in a b...
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Critical Essay by Benjamin De Mott
It's a rule, seemingly, that a Gardner novel will be—in at least one of its dimensions—the story of somebody's intellectual life.
And for...
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Critical Essay by Kathryn Vanspanckeren
When one stands back to consider the shape of John Gardner's works as a whole, certain recurring "obsessive metaphors" or polysemous ...
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John Gardner
John (Champlin) Gardner, Jr.
