John Irving enjoys a rare and prominent place among contemporary American writers not only for having published a string of best-sellers but also for having received accolades from critics in the popular and academic press alike. His status has been assu...

John Irving was born in Exeter, Massachusetts, the son of F. N. and Frances Winslow Irving. His father was a teacher of Russian history at Exeter Academy, the prep school which Irving attended during his adolescence. There he acquired his lifelong intere...

One of a few modern best-selling writers who also has literary stature, John Irving (born 1942) rose to prominence in 1979 with his fourth novel, The World According to Garp. His novels have combined 19th century traditions with modern-day melodrama, sex...

[John Irving's The Hotel New Hampshire is] a family chronicle—a tale of generations of parents coping with children and siblings coping with each other…. Family dailiness—traditional sitcom material—is in nearly constant view throughout the novel. Father and mother tell stories about their youth to their children. Grandfather teaches grandson his special athletic skills. Mother intercedes when older siblings try to force their juniors into premature knowingness. Mother spe...

"The Hotel New Hampshire," the story of an eccentric family that sets up house in various unlikely hotels here and abroad, is a hectic gaudy saga with the verve of a Marx Brothers movie; one can see those old words "antic" and "zany" emblazoned on the marquee. Midgets, dwarfs and performing bears race in and out of the novel with manic haste; the narrator's homosexual brother sleeps with a dressmaker's dummy; toilets explode: Anything for a laugh. But ...

[There] is no denying that [John Irving] has at least one thing in common with … Twain and Dickens: he can tell stories. Things happen in The Hotel New Hampshire; if one admired Irving for nothing else, one would have to admit that he can keep as many narrative balls in the air without dropping them as anyone in America now writing fiction. Whether or not his books instruct and delight as we critics are supposed to think they should, they are full of characters and events, and suffused with details, ...