Buechner, Frederick (Vol. 4) - Buechner, Frederick 1926–
Buechner, Frederick 1926–
Buechner, an American, is a Christian novelist. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 13-14.)
It is a common presumption that Frederick Buechner is the delight of the more precious academic critics. His novels, it is said, honor their stately edicts on the art of fiction, and his exquisite sensibility—hushed comparisons are made with Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen, Truman Capote—offends no canons of taste. True, Buechner is sometimes the willing victim of his most elegant vices, but he is also the victim of a larger controversy in which the word acȧdemic has become a shibboleth. Buechner has taught in preparatory schools; he is also an ordained Presbyterian minister, and a novelist who has tried, with uneven success, to harmonize a world of subtle human feelings and complex religious ideas. Steeped, by his own admission, in the great prose writers of the seventeenth century—Jeremy Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne—he...
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