Donald Barthelme

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Barthelme, Donald (1931–89), author of stories collected in Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964), Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968), City Life (1970), Sadness (1972), Guilty Pleasures (1974), Amateurs (1976), Great Days (1979), and Overnight to Many Distant Cities (1984), all possessed of a fantastic humor marked by a straightforward presentation of absurdly grotesque, illogical, and meaningless matters as if to indicate that their world, and therefore our own, is wholly irrational. The same attitudes and parodic style mark his novels, Snow White (1967), an oblique, incongruous version of the fairy tale in episodic form, and The Dead Father (1975), telling of 19 children hauling their father, both a living man and a gigantic carcass, across a city to his death. Paradise (1986) is a fantasy as a novel, considered somewhat lesser. Forty Stories (1987) nicely complements his Sixty Stories (1981). The King (1990) is a fanciful history of King Arthur at his Round Table transposed to 1940s England and Nazi bombings.

Donald Barthelme , 1931–89, American writer, b. Philadelphia. The son of an architect, he grew up in Texas, moved (1962) to New York City, worked as a curator and an editor, and taught creative writing at several universities. In his short stories and novels, Barthelme describes a world so unreal that traditional modes of fiction can no longer encompass it. His stories are frequently literary collages, employing advertising jargon, bits of text from other writers' works, counterfeit footnotes, recondite allusions, and various typographical and narrative extravagances to fit his own private and ironic vision of an absurd reality. Barthelme's works include the novels Snow White (1967) and The Dead Father (1975); the short-story collections Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968), City Life (1970), Sadness (1972), Great Days (1979), and Sixty Stories (1981); a collection of nonfiction pieces, Guilty Pleasures (1974); and a children's book (1971).

Bibliography: See biography by T. Daugherty (2009); memoirs by his brothers F. and S. Barthelme (1999) and his ex-wife H. M. Barthelme (2001); studies by L. Gordon (1981), W. B. Stengel (1985), S. Trachtenberg (1990), R. F. Patteson, ed. (1992), B. L. Roe (1992), and M. T. Hudgens (2001).