The American novelist Frederick Buechner (born 1926) was also a Presbyterian minister and theologian whose novels and essays after his conversion explored the grace and healing which penetrate the everyday darkness of human estrangement.

Carl Frederick Buechner was born on July 11, 1926, in New York City, the older of two sons of Carl Frederick and Katherine Kuhn Buechner. Although both of Buechner's parents' families were wealthly and connected with the upper-class, his immediate family was never more than modestly well situated. His father, a Princeton graduate and minor executive who moved from job to job and place to place on the East Coast during the Depression years, committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning when Buechner was ten. The event had a lasting impact on Frederick, who with his brother James saw the body on the driveway as their mother and grandmother tried frantically to revive their father. Relationships between parents...