The stories of Donald Barthelme are wonders of invention, compression, and imaginative brilliance that revolutionized the American short story in the 1960s and ’70s. Unpredictable, slyly subversive, and often hilarious, Barthelme’s work displays a restless artist’s mind engaging contemporary life’s complexities and speculating on the human place in the world through the adventure of writing, “a process,” he once remarked, “of dealing with not-knowing.” In his fusion of psychological distance and emotional impact, his use of collage and ambiguity, and the lasting aftereffects of even his most enigmatic creations, Barthelme invites comparison with Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka and such towering modern visual artists as Paul Klee, Joseph Cornell, and Pablo Picasso. This Library of America edition of Barthelme’s stories is the largest and most comprehensive ever published. It restores to print the original book collections he meticulously selected and arranged, now iconic volumes that, like the era’s classic LP’s, are best experienced whole. From the stunning debut Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964) to the late-career explorations of Overnight to Many Distant Cities (1983), these collections unfold with inimitable Barthelmean logic, mischievousness, and bittersweetness. Also gathered here are stories from Barthelme’s own retrospectives Sixty Stories and Forty Stories as well as pieces left uncollected at the time of his death in 1989. Editor Charles McGrath’s introduction offers a discerning assessment of Barthelme’s career, and the volume’s extensive annotations clarify the freewheeling, wide-ranging allusions, running the gamut from high to pop culture, scattered throughout his work. Time and again these stories reveal, in the space of just a few pages, how Barthelme’s singular creative alchemy led him to wrest profundities out of the seemingly ephemeral, even trivial. “Barthelme distrusted,” as McGrath observes in his introduction, “the means of traditional fiction but not its end—to help make sense of things... There’s always another day in Barthelme, a redemptive sense of open-endedness, and a belief that small miracles are sometimes possible.”
Author
Donald Barthelme was born to two students at the University of Pennsylvania. The family moved to Texas two years later, where Barthelme's father would become a professor of architecture at the University of Houston, where Barthelme would later major in journalism. In 1951, still a student, he wrote his first articles for the Houston Post. Barthelme was drafted into the Korean War in 1953, arriving in Korea on July 27, the very day the cease-fire ending the war was signed. He served briefly as the editor of an Army newspaper before returning to the U.S. and his job at the Houston Post. Once back, he continued his studies at the University of Houston, studying philosophy. Although he continued to take classes until 1957, he never received a degree. He spent much of his free time in Houston’s “black” jazz clubs, listening to musical innovators such as Lionel Hampton and Peck Kelly, an experience which influenced his later writing. Barthelme's relationship with his father was a struggle between a rebellious son and a demanding father. In later years they would have tremendous arguments about the kinds of literature in which Barthelme was interested and wrote. While in many ways his father was avant-garde in art and aesthetics, he did not approve of the post-modern and deconstruction schools. Barthelme's attitude toward his father is delineated in the novels The Dead Father and The King as he is pictured in the characters King Arthur and Lancelot. Barthelme's independence also shows in his moving away from the family's Roman Catholicism (his mother was especially devout), a separation that troubled Barthelme throughout his life as did the distance with his father. He seemed much closer to his mother and agreeable to her strictures. Barthelme went on to teach for brief periods at Boston University, University at Buffalo, and the College of the City of New York, where he served as Distinguished Visiting Professor from 1974-75. He married four times. His second wife, Helen Barthelme, later wrote a biography entitled Donald Barthelme: The Genesis of a Cool Sound, published in 2001. With his third wife Birgit, a Dane, he had his first child, a daughter named Anne, and near the end of his life he married Marion, with whom he had his second daughter, Kate. Marion and Donald remained wed until his 1989 death from throat cancer. Donald Barthelme's brothers Frederick (1943 - ) and Steven (1947- ) are also respected fiction writers and teachers at The University of Southern Mississippi.
