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 local schools, and worked on his father's farm. His moth...

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, and libretti. Best known for his novels Grendel, The...

"Our Christ is not a dead Christ," my father repeated. He was objecting to the Catholic cult of the crucifix. "The cross is an empty cross. Our Lord is all powerful." So he believed in the charismatic gifts, and above all in healing. But...

"We've got skyscrapers tall as the sky, more than a hunart stories high," Jeff told his cousins Carol and Jimmy. "And sometimes the traffic's so bad you can't even get to town!" Jeff was still not happy at being left with Aunt Tia in...

To judge from John Gardner's 10th novel [Mickelsson's Ghosts], published shortly before his death last month in a motorcycle accident at age 49, he believed in ghosts. Also in witches, hex signs and divergent spectral assemblies, such as a government-supported group of Mafia landfillers and a Mormon-affiliated SS troop called the Sons of Dan. Although Peter Mickelsson, Gardner's primary witness to these questionable incarnations, is a philosophy instructor who might well be cast as �...