Born in Batavia, New York, in 1933, John Gardner suffered lifelong guilt over a fatal tractor accident that killed his younger brother in 1945; the 11-year-old John was at the wheel of the vehicle when his brother, riding in back, fell under its cultipacker, a heavy device designed to crush earth. As an adult, Gardner maintained that “art begins in a wound,” and before he himself died in a motorcycle accident in 1982, he published a number of works that sought to heal or at least ease the “wound inherent in the nature of life itself” (Gardner, On Moral Fiction, p. 181). Gardner firmly believed in art’s ability to shape human experience, for good or ill. In his essay On Moral Fiction, Gardner scolds his contemporary novelists for abdicating their responsibility to produce moral art. Though a poet and a critic as well, Gardner became known mainly for his novels, of which Grendel was the third (after The Resurrection, 1966 and The Wreckage of Agathon, 1970). He would go on to produce more novels, but Grendel, which addresses some of the searching philosophical questions of Gardner’s age, would remain his most enduring. In effect, the novel lets life’s inherent wound speak for itself in the brutally cynical voice of a murderous monster, a fiend borrowed from an epic poem who distrusts and fears poetry’s power to comfort and create.
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