Donald Barthelme was born in Philadelphia in 1931. His family moved to Houston two years later. Barthelme served in the U.S. Army in Japan and Korea before working as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post. In 1962, at the age of thirty, he moved to New York City, where he edited Location, an avant-garde literary magazine. The following year, his first published story appeared in the New Yorker. In addition to regular contributions to the New Yorker, he published subsequent fiction in Atlantic, Harper's, and other noted magazines and journals. His first collection of short stories, Come Back, Dr. Caligari, was published in 1964. He followed this with the short novel, Snow White, in 1967.

In addition to Snow White, Barthelme wrote three other novels: The Dead Father, Paradise, and The King. But the short story was Barthelme's specialty. These stories were collected in eleven volumes, including: Unspeakable...