Donald Barthelme

A detailed Summary of Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme has been called "probably the most perversely gifted writer in the U.S." As well as " one of the best, most significant and carefully developing young American writers" (Harte and Riley, 41). He was born April 7, 1931 to Donald and Helen Barthelme in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Barthelme had a wide range of careers during his lifetime. He worked as a newspaper reporter and as a managing editor of Location, and art and literature review (Harte and Riley, 41). His other jobs included serving in Korea and Japan in the U.S. Army (Barthelme Bio, 1), Professor of English at the City University of New York, teacher of Creative Writing at the University of Texas in Houston, and of course author of short stories and novels (Anderson et al, 919). He is the author of a number of collections of short stories including "Come Back, Dr. Caligari" (1964); "Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts" (1968); " City Life" (1971); "Sadness" (1972); "Great Days" (1978); "Overnight to Many Distant Cities" (1983); and "Paradise" (1986). He also wrote Snow White, a parody of the popular children's fairy tale, the novel. He won the National Book Award for Children's literature for the book titled "The Slightly Ir

To get a feel for what the way Donald Barthelme writes I read a few of his short stories. Barthelme is a "writer of experimental fiction who creates funny and disturbing stories by putting different parts of stories that are seemingly unimportant to one another together"(Marowski and Matuz, 34). Anatole Broyard says", Barthelme is so funny that most readers will never know how serious he is" (Harte and Riley, 41). I do not agree with either of these people that Barthelme is funny. I do agree thought that he does seem to be a very serious writer. Thomas Leitch says about Barthelme:

"Perhaps the most striking feature of Donald Barthelme's fiction is the number of things it get along without. In Barthelme's fictive world, there appear to be no governing or shaping beliefs, no transcendent ideals or intimations, no very significant physical experience, no sense of place or community, no awareness on the part of his characters of any personal history or context of profession or family or, for the most part, personal relationships, no psychology of character, indeed no characters at all in the usual sense of the term."(Marowski and Matuz, 35)I agree with what Leitch says. The short stories I read did not follow the usual way that stories are written. Most of the stories did not seem to have any point at all to the story.

The first story I read was The Game. This story is about two men, that are locked in a room together, whose mission is to insert keys and launch nuclear missiles when they see certain events happen on the televisions that they have. They are completely cut off from the rest of the world and seem to have lost sight of reality.

Some common words found in the essay are:
Donald Barthelme's, Donald Barthelme, According Literature, Harte Riley, Stylist Anderson, Texas Houston, Book Prize, Pennsylvania Barthelme, Snow White, City Life, short stories, donald barthelme, story read, harte riley, stories read, al 919, et al 919, harte riley 41, et al, riley 41, widely regarded ablest, regarded ablest, widely regarded, regarded ablest versatile, anderson et al,

Approximate Word count = 1121
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: People