John Irving

Irving grew up in Exeter, New Hampshire, where his stepfather taught at Phillips Exeter Academy, and wrestled competitively through college and beyond, an obsession that recurs throughout his fiction alongside prep schools, Vienna, and bears. He studied at the Iowa Writers' Workshop under Kurt Vonnegut, who became a lasting influence and friend.

His first three novels sold modestly, but The World According to Garp (1978), tracing T. S. Garp's life as a novelist, husband, and father alongside his radical feminist mother Jenny Fields, became a cultural phenomenon, its comic sprawl absorbing sudden, arbitrary violence without ever losing its warmth. It won the National Book Award in the paperback category in 1980.

He has since published over a dozen more novels, including The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany, cultivating a devoted readership across five decades while remaining, by his own account, most indebted to Dickens's example of the capacious, plotted novel.