He traveled to Austria, where in 1963-1964 he attended the University of Vienna. During his stay there he married Shyla Leary, a painter whom he had known for some time. Vienna is of central importance in Irving's fiction. According to one commentator, it gave him the sense of history which he had never developed in America; recent Viennese history, especially of the World War II years, is particularly significant in his first three novels. In a 1979
Rolling Stone interview, Irving called the Austrian capital "a real place for me.... It was so old and strange ... that it forced me to pay attention to every aspect of it." But the Vienna in his books is different from the actual city: "It's not the
Vienna Vienna--and that gave me great freedom. I didn't have to be responsible to Vienna. Vienna was a place I could
make up." In each of his novels Vienna is tied to the past, to the imagination, to youthful ideals and fantasies. His experiences there provided the subject matter for much of his fiction, but his writing is
not autobiographical, though it may contain some autobiographical elements.
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