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...

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 �...