Donald Barthelme Jr. (pronounced BAR-thəl-mee; April 7, 1931–July 23, 1989) was an American writer who wrote short stories and novels. His work was known for its funny and unusual style. Barthelme worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post. He was the managing editor of Location magazine and the director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston from 1961 to 1962. He co-founded a publication called Fiction with Mark Mirsky, with help from Max and Marianne Frisch. Barthelme also taught at several universities. He was one of the first people to start the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
Early life
Donald Barthelme was born in Philadelphia in 1931. His father and mother were students at the University of Pennsylvania. Two years later, the family moved to Texas, and Barthelme’s father became a professor of architecture at the University of Houston, where Barthelme later studied journalism. In 1949, while a student at Lamar High School in Houston, Barthelme won a Scholastic Writing Award for short stories. (He also attended St. Thomas Catholic High School in Houston.)
In 1951, as a student, he wrote his first articles for the Houston Post. Two years later, Barthelme was drafted into the U.S. Army and arrived in Korea on July 27, 1953, the day the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed, which ended the Korean War. He was assigned to the 2nd Infantry Division and briefly worked as the editor of an Army newspaper and the Public Information Office of the Eighth Army before returning to the United States and resuming his job at the Houston Post.
At that time, he continued his studies at the University of Houston, focusing on philosophy, and founded a literary journal called Forum, which published works by future well-known writers such as Norman Mailer, Walker Percy, Marshall McLuhan, and William H. Gass. Although Barthelme took classes until 1957, he never earned a degree. He often visited Houston’s Black jazz clubs in his free time, listening to musicians like Lionel Hampton and Peck Kelley, experiences that later influenced his writing.
Career
Donald Barthelme taught at Boston University, the University at Buffalo, and the City College of New York. At City College, he was a distinguished visiting professor from 1974 to 1975.
In 1961, he became the director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. That same year, he published his first short story. In 1963, The New Yorker magazine published his story "L'Lapse," which was a humorous copy of a film by Michelangelo Antonioni called L'Eclisse (The Eclipse). The New Yorker later published many of Barthelme’s early stories, including "Me and Miss Mandible," a tale about a 35-year-old man sent to elementary school due to a mistake, a failed job, or a failed marriage. This story, written in October 1960, was the first of his stories to be published. Another early story, "A Shower of Gold," describes a sculptor who appears on a philosophical game show called Who Am I? In 1964, Barthelme collected his early stories into a book titled Come Back, Dr. Caligari, which received praise for changing how short stories were written. His stories often placed famous or fictional characters in strange situations, such as in "The Joker's Greatest Triumph," which was inspired by Batman.
Barthelme continued writing successful short stories in Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968). One story from this collection, "The Balloon," shows a person inflating a large, unusual balloon over Manhattan. People react differently: children enjoy it, adults try to find meaning in it, and authorities try to destroy it but fail. At the end, the story reveals the narrator did it for personal reasons and sees no meaning in the balloon itself. Other stories from this collection include "The Indian Uprising," which mixes a Comanche attack with modern city life, and "Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning," a series of scenes showing the difficulty of understanding public figures. This story was published just two months before Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1968.
Barthelme wrote over 100 more short stories, which were collected in books like City Life (1970), Sadness (1972), Amateurs (1976), Great Days (1979), and Overnight to Many Distant Cities (1983). Many of these stories were later reprinted and revised in collections such as Sixty Stories (1981) and Forty Stories (1987). After his death, more stories were published in Flying to America (2007). In addition to short stories, Barthelme wrote four novels: Snow White (1967), The Dead Father (1975), Paradise (1986), and The King (1990, published after his death).
Barthelme also wrote a non-fiction book titled Guilty Pleasures (1974). After his death, his other writings were collected in The Teachings of Don B.: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme (1992) and Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews (1997). He wrote a children’s book, The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine, with his daughter. This book won the 1972 National Book Award in the Children’s Books category. Barthelme was also a director of PEN, the Authors Guild, and a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
Personal life
Barthelme had a difficult relationship with his father, who was strict, and Barthelme often disagreed with him. Later in life, they had many arguments about the types of books Barthelme liked and wrote. Although his father was creative in art, he did not like the postmodern and deconstruction styles.
His brothers, Frederick (born in 1943) and Steven (born in 1947), are also well-known writers of fiction.
He married four times. His second wife, Helen Moore Barthelme, wrote a biography titled Donald Barthelme: The Genesis of a Cool Sound, which was published in 2001. With his third wife, Birgit from Denmark, he had a daughter named Anne. Near the end of his life, he married Marion Knox Barthelme, and they had a second daughter, Katharine. Marion and Donald stayed married until Donald's death in 1989. Marion passed away in 2011.
Style and legacy
Barthelme's fiction was praised by some for being very organized and criticized by others for seeming to have no meaning or purpose. His ideas and writing were greatly influenced by 20th-century concerns, and he read widely, including works by Pascal, Husserl, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Ionesco, Beckett, Sartre, and Camus.
Barthelme's stories usually avoid traditional story structures, instead building up a collection of details that appear unrelated. By surprising readers with unexpected shifts in ideas, he created a broken-up style of writing similar to modernist works like T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and James Joyce's Ulysses, which he often challenged. However, Barthelme's doubt and use of humor set him apart from modernist writers who believed art could help rebuild society. Most critics placed him in the postmodernist group. Literary critics noted that Barthelme, like Stéphane Mallarmé, whom he admired, experimented with word meanings, using poetic intuition to create new connections between ideas. George Wicks called Barthelme "the leading American practitioner of surrealism today… whose fiction continues the investigations of consciousness and experiments in expression that began with Dada and surrealism a half-century ago." Jacob M. Appel described him as "the most influential unread author in United States history."
Most of Barthelme's work was published in The New Yorker, where editor Roger Angell supported his writing. In 1964, he began publishing short-story collections, starting with Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964), followed by Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968) and City Life (1970). Time magazine named City Life one of the best books of the year, calling it written with "Kafka's purity of language and some of Beckett's grim humor." His original style is seen in his use of parody in "The School" or a list of 100 numbered sentences in "The Glass Mountain." Joyce Carol Oates wrote about this fragmented style in a 1972 essay, noting, "This from a writer of arguable genius whose works reflect what he himself must feel, in book after book, that his brain is all fragments… just like everything else." A clear example of this idea appears in "See the Moon?" from Unspeakable Practices, where the narrator repeats, "Fragments are the only forms I trust." It is important to note that this quote does not reflect Barthelme's personal beliefs, as he disliked how often it was linked to him.
Another technique Barthelme used was inserting illustrations from 19th-century publications into his stories, often paired with ironic captions. He called this process "a secret vice gone public." In Guilty Pleasures, the story "The Expedition" included a full-page image of a ship collision with the caption "Not our fault!"
At the University of Houston, Barthelme helped create the respected Creative Writing Program. He was known as a kind and supportive teacher to young writers, even as he continued his own work. Thomas Cobb, one of his students, wrote a doctoral dissertation titled Crazy Heart in 1987, partly based on Barthelme.
Influences
In interviews from 1971 to 1972, collected in Not-Knowing, Barthelme shared a list of writers he admired, including both past and present authors. In other interviews from the same collection, Barthelme repeated many of these names and also mentioned others, sometimes explaining why these writers were meaningful to him. During a 1975 interview with Pacifica Radio, Barthelme said that Samuel Beckett was the most important writer who influenced him. He stated, "I'm enormously impressed by Beckett. I'm just overwhelmed by Beckett, as Beckett was, I think, by Joyce." The following is a list of writers mentioned in these interviews.
Barthelme was also influenced by modern artists, especially Robert Rauschenberg, who used "found object" collage techniques in his artwork.