He also likes the Beatles.
In school he felt drawn to chemistry but did not care for the laboratory. Noticing that he always got A's in English, he decided that was his field. He attended DePauw University from 1951 to 1953, the year in which, a month shy of his twentieth birthday, he married Joan Louise Patterson. They have two children, Joel and Lucy. Gardner took an A.B. at Washington University in St. Louis in 1955, and at the State University of Iowa he took an M.A. in 1956 and a Ph.D. in 1958. For his doctoral dissertation he wrote a novel, The Old Men, which has not been published. He has taught medieval literature and creative writing at numerous schools including Oberlin, Bennington, Skidmore, Southern Illinois, Northwestern, Chico State College, the University of Detroit, San Francisco State, and the University of Rochester. Recently retired from teaching, Gardner lives in Cambridge, New York.
Gardner's first published novel, The Resurrection (1966), attracted little attention. In a waspish dismissal in Saturday Review Granville Hicks declared it "pretty muddled," and the novel does make many demands on the reader, including as it does a good deal of technical experimentation.
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