One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest / Thumb Tripping / The End of the Road / The World According to Garp

John Barth taught for many years in the writing program at Johns Hopkins University, and he lives in Chestertown, Maryland. (Publisher Provided) John Simmons Barth was born on May 27, 1930 in Cambridge, Maryland. He is considered to be one of the American writers who introduced a U.S. audience to experimental fiction. Barth began as a conventional show more novelist, exploring existential themes of suicide in The Floating Opera (1956) and the complexity of love in The End of the Road (1958). By the end of the 1950s, however, he was exploring less realistic techniques to keep the reader from being pulled into the story, and thus to make larger points. Those techniques include parody, which Barth first used in The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), to mock the style of the eighteenth-century picaresque novel, and Giles Goat-Boy (1966), which depicts the world as a giant university. In Chimera (1972), for which he won the National Book Award, Barth applied his method to retell classical myths. His later works include Letters (1979), in which Barth himself appears as a character, and Sabbatical (1982), the story of a woman college professor and her novelist husband, both of whom address the reader and author. Barth's other novels include The Tidewater Tales (1987) and The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991). For most of his career as a writer, he has also been a professor of English, teaching at Pennsylvania State University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, and The Johns Hopkins University. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

John Irving published his first novel at the age of twenty-six. He has received awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation; he has won an O. Henry Award, a National Book Award, and an Academy Award. (Publisher Provided) John Irving was born John Wallace Blunt, Jr. on March 2, 1942 in show more Exeter, New Hampshire. His named was changed to John Winslow Irving when his stepfather adopted him at the age of six. He was a dyslexic child and it took him five years to get through Exeter Academy, which is where his adoptive father taught Russian history. He received a B.A. (cum laude) from the University of New Hampshire in 1965 and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, in 1967, where he studied with Kurt Vonnegut Jr. His first novel was Setting Free the Bears (1969) but it wasn't until The World According to Garp was published in 1978, that he became a literary star. The novel spent six months on the bestseller list and won the American Book Award in 1980. It was also made into a movie in 1982 starring Robin Williams and costarring Glenn Close and John Lithgow. In 1981, he received an O. Henry Award for the short story Interior Space. Some of his other novels were also made into movies including The Hotel New Hampshire starring Jodie Foster and Rob Lowe; A Prayer for Owen Meany, which was titled Simon Birch starring Jim Carrey; and The Cider House Rules starring Michael Caine. He won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules in 2000. Irving also wrote two memoirs; one detailing his wrestling adventures entitled The Imaginary Girlfriend, and another concerning his novels made into Hollywood films entitled My Movie Business: A Memoir. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

Ken Kesey, September 17, 1935 - November 10, 2001 Kenneth Elton "Ken" Kesey was born in Colorado on September 17, 1935. He graduated from the University of Oregon, and published two full-length novels that helped to give him a cult following. "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1962) owes much to Kesey's own experience as a ward attendant at the show more Menlo Park Veterans' Hospital. This exciting first novel was told from the point of view of a half-Indian man who thinks of himself as the Big Chief pictured on the writing tablets of everybody's school days looking out at the other inmates in a Disneylike world. Its portrayal of the doomed but heroic rebel McMurphy stood for a particular kind of American individualism. The book was adapted into a successful stage play by Dale Wasserman, and in 1975, Milos Forman directed a screen adaptation, which won the "Big Five" Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actor (Jack Nicholson), Best Actress (Louise Fletcher), Best Director (Forman) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Lawrence Hauben, Bo Goldman). Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion (1964) is a long, complex novel that troubled many of his earlier readers. Kesey's most recent novel was Demon Box (1987); although it was somewhat well received, it was still compared unfavorably to his earlier works. His last major work was an essay for Rolling Stone magazine calling for peace in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. On October 25, 2001, Kesey had surgery on his liver to remove a tumor. He died of complications from the surgery on November 10, 2001. He was 66. (Bowker Author Biography) show less