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John Irving
John Winslow Irving (born John Wallace Blunt Jr.; March 2, 1942) is an American and Canadian novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter. Irving achieved critical and popular acclaim after the international success of his fourth novel '' The World According to Garp'' in 1978. Many of Irving's novels, including '' The Hotel New Hampshire'' (1981), '' The Cider House Rules'' (1985), '' A Prayer for Owen Meany'' (1989), and '' A Widow for One Year'' (1998), have been bestsellers. He won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 72nd Academy Awards in 2000 for his script of the film adaptation of ''The Cider House Rules''."John Irving 1999 Acceptance Speech on Winning the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay" , ''oscars.org'' Five of hi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
A Prayer For Owen Meany
''A Prayer for Owen Meany'' is the seventh novel by American writer John Irving. Published in 1989, it tells the story of John Wheelwright and his best friend Owen Meany growing up together in a small New Hampshire town during the 1950s and 1960s. According to John's narration, Owen is a remarkable boy in many ways; he believes himself to be God's instrument and sets out to fulfill the fate he has prophesied for himself. The novel is also an homage to Günter Grass's most famous novel, ''The Tin Drum''. Grass was a great influence for John Irving, as well as a close friend. The main characters of both novels, Owen Meany and Oskar Matzerath, share the same initials as well as some other characteristics, and their stories show some parallels. Irving has confirmed the similarities. ''A Prayer for Owen Meany'', however, follows an independent and separate plot. Plot summary The story is narrated by John Wheelwright, a former citizen of New Hampshire who has become a voluntary expa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
:Template:Infobox Writer/doc
Infobox writer may be used to summarize information about a person who is a writer/author (includes screenwriters). If the writer-specific fields here are not needed, consider using the more general ; other infoboxes there can be found in :People and person infobox templates. This template may also be used as a module (or sub-template) of ; see WikiProject Infoboxes/embed for guidance on such usage. Syntax The infobox may be added by pasting the template as shown below into an article. All fields are optional. Any unused parameter names can be left blank or omitted. Parameters Please remove any parameters from an article's infobox that are unlikely to be used. All parameters are optional. Unless otherwise specified, if a parameter has multiple values, they should be comma-separated using the template: : which produces: : , language= If any of the individual values contain commas already, add to use semi-colons as separators: : which produces: : , pseu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Simon Birch
''Simon Birch'' is a 1998 American comedy-drama film loosely based on the 1989 novel '' A Prayer for Owen Meany'' by John Irving and written for the screen and directed by Mark Steven Johnson in his directorial debut. The film stars Ian Michael Smith, Joseph Mazzello, Jim Carrey, Ashley Judd, and Oliver Platt. It omitted much of the latter half of the novel and altered the ending. The film does not share the book's title at Irving's request; he did not believe that his novel could successfully be made into a film. The name "Simon Birch" was suggested by him to replace that of Owen Meany. The opening credits of the film state that it was "suggested by" Irving's novel. The main plot centers on 12-year-old Joe Wenteworth and his best friend Simon Birch, who was born with dwarfism. The film received negative reviews from critics and was a box office bomb that grossed only $18.3 million against a budget of $20 million. Plot An adult Joe Wenteworth visits the grave of his late ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The 158-Pound Marriage
''The 158-Pound Marriage'' is the third novel by American author John Irving. The book explores the sexual revolution-era trend of " swinging" (partner-swapping) via a glimpse into the lives of two couples in a small New England college town who enter casually into such an affair, with disastrous consequences. Plot summary The narrator (who never identifies himself by name) is a college professor and a relatively unsuccessful author of historical novels. While doing research in Vienna, Austria, he met Utch, an orphaned survivor of the German occupation and the Russian siege at the end of World War II. At the opening of the novel, the narrator and Utch are married with two children and live a relatively placid existence until, at a faculty party, they become acquainted with Severin Winter, a Viennese-born professor of German and coach of the school's wrestling team, and his wife Edith, a WASP from a privileged background (she met her husband in Vienna while on a buying trip fo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Water-Method Man
''The Water Method Man'' (1972) is the second published novel by American novelist John Irving. Plot summary The novel revolves around the mishaps of its narrator, Fred Trumper, a floundering late-twenty-something graduate student with serious commitment and honesty issues that earn him the nickname "Bogus." The novel shows Irving beginning to develop a blend of comedy and pathos, as well as a penchant for fashioning quirky characters. It follows a non-linear narrative in the form of a sort of "confession" authored by Trumper, who humorously recounts his various failures in life and love, from his New England childhood through his experiences on foreign study in Vienna, Austria, and as a graduate student in Iowa, leading up to the present-action setting, early-1970s New York, where Trumper is attempting to sever himself from his adolescent past. "I want to change", Trumper says at the end of Chapter One. The phrase seems to be the novel's central theme. The title refers to a m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Iowa Writers' Workshop
The Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa, is a graduate-level creative writing program. At 89 years, it is the oldest writing program offering a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in the United States. Its acceptance rate is between 2.7% and 3.7%. On the university's behalf, the workshop administers the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and the Iowa Short Fiction Award. The workshop's director is the writer Lan Samantha Chang, under whom its endowment has grown from $2.6 million to $12.5 million. History In 1897, theater producer George Cram Cook began teaching a class called "Verse-Making", effectively the University of Iowa's first creative writing class. In 1922, Dean Carl Seashore of the University of Iowa Graduate College allowed creative writing to be accepted as theses for advanced degrees. Later, the School of Letters began selecting students for writing courses in which they were tutored by resident and visiting writers. The Iowa Writers' Works ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut ( ; November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American author known for his Satire, satirical and darkly humorous novels. His published work includes fourteen novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction works over fifty-plus years; further works have been published since his death. Born and raised in Indianapolis, Vonnegut attended Cornell University, but withdrew in January 1943 and enlisted in the United States Army, U.S. Army. As part of his training, he studied mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Mellon University, Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee. He was then deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was prisoner of war, interned in Dresden, where he survived the Bombing of Dresden in World War II, Allied bombing of the city in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned. After the war, he married Jane Marie Cox ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Setting Free The Bears
''Setting Free the Bears'' is the first novel by American author John Irving, published in 1968 by Random House. Irving studied at the Institute of European Studies in Vienna in 1963, and ''Bears'' was written between 1965 and 1967 based largely on Irving's understanding of the city and its rebellious youth of the 1960s. The original manuscript for the book was submitted as his Master's thesis at the University of Iowa's Writer's Workshop in 1967, and was later expanded and revised to its published version. Synopsis The book's central plot concerns a plan to liberate all the animals from the Vienna Zoo as happened just after the conclusion of World War II. Irving's two protagonists—Graff, a young Austrian college student, and Siggy, an eccentric motorcycle mechanic-cum-philosopher—meet and embark on an adventure-filled motorcycle tour of Austria before the novel's climax: "the great zoo bust". Toward the middle of the book, the two protagonists go their separate ways, and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
United States Army Air Forces
The United States Army Air Forces (USAAF or AAF) was the major land-based aerial warfare service component of the United States Army and ''de facto'' aerial warfare service branch of the United States during and immediately after World War II (1941–1947). It was created on 20 June 1941 as successor to the previous United States Army Air Corps and is the direct predecessor of the United States Air Force, today one of the six United States Armed Forces, armed forces of the United States. The AAF was a component of the United States Army, which on 2 March 1942 was divided functionally by executive order into three autonomous forces: the Army Ground Forces, the United States Army Services of Supply (which in 1943 became the Army Service Forces), and the Army Air Forces. Each of these forces had a commanding general who reported directly to the Chief of Staff of the United States Army, Army Chief of Staff. The AAF administered all parts of military aviation formerly distributed am ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frederick Buechner
Carl Frederick Buechner ( ; July 11, 1926 – August 15, 2022) was an American author, Presbyterian Presbyterianism is a historically Reformed Protestant tradition named for its form of church government by representative assemblies of elders, known as "presbyters". Though other Reformed churches are structurally similar, the word ''Pr ... Minister (Christianity), minister, preacher, and theologian. The author of thirty-nine published books, his career spanned more than six decades and encompassed many different genres. He wrote novels, including ''Godric (novel), Godric'' (1981 Pulitzer Prize finalist)'', A Long Day's Dying'' and ''The Book of Bebb'', his memoirs, including ''The Sacred Journey,'' and theological works, such as ''Secrets in the Dark: a life in sermons, Secrets in the Dark'', ''The Magnificent Defeat'', and ''Telling the Truth: the Gospel as tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale, Telling the Truth''. Buechner was named "without question one of the truly g ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Assistant Coach
An athletic coach is a person coaching in sport, involved in the direction, instruction, and training of a sports team or athlete. History The original sense of the word ''Coach'' is that of a Coach (carriage), horse-drawn carriage, deriving ultimately from the Hungarian city of Kocs where such vehicles were first made. Students at the University of Oxford in the early nineteenth century used the slang word to refer to a private tutor who would drive a less able student through his examinations just like horse driving. Britain took the lead in upgrading the status of sports in the 19th century. For sports to become professionalized, "coacher" had to become established. It gradually professionalized in the Victorian era and the role was well established by 1914. In the First World War, military units sought out the coaches to supervise physical conditioning and develop morale-building teams. Effectiveness John Wooden had a philosophy of coaching that encouraged planning, organ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Student Athlete
Student athlete (or student–athlete) is a term used principally in universities in the United States and Canada to describe students enrolled at postsecondary educational institutions, principally colleges and universities, but also at secondary schools, who participate in organized competitive sports sponsored by that educational institution or school. The term is also interchangeable with the synonymous term “ varsity athlete”. The term ''student-athlete'' was coined by Walter Byers, the first executive director of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). It arose in response to a 1957 worker's compensation case filed by Billie Dwade Dennison, the widow of Ray Dennison, who died while playing football for Fort Lewis A&M (since renamed to Fort Lewis College). As Byers writes in his memoir, the word was designed to avoid the "dreaded notion that NCAA athletes could be identified as employees by state industrial commissions and the courts. We crafted the t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
