John Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, on 2 March 1942. His birth name was John Wallace Blunt Jr., in honor of his biological father, a World War II flyer who was shot down over Burma. Irving's mother, Frances Winslow Irving, legally changed his name to John Winslow Irving when he was six years old after he had been adopted by her second husband, Colin F. N. Irving. Because his stepfather taught in the history department at Phillips Exeter Academy, Irving was granted admission, but his struggles as both an outsider (he was one of the few students at the academy who, like the other faculty children, was actually from Exeter) and as a floundering student who was later diagnosed as dyslexic became the backdrop for his journey as a writer. At Exeter, under the tutelage of his wrestling coach, Ted Seabrooke, and his writing teacher, Mr. Bennett, Irving began to cultivate his two lifelong passions: wrestling and writing. His writing process and his understanding of the act of writing were also influenced by the variety of coping strategies that he developed as a result of his learning disability.
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