The World According to Garp (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: John Irving
- First Published: 1978
- Type of Work: Novel
- Genres: Long fiction, Picaresque fiction
- Subjects: 1950’s, 1960’s, 1970’s, New York, North America or North Americans, Northeast, U.S., United States or Americans, Mothers, Parents and children, Love or romance, Sex or sexuality, Authors or writers, New York City, 1940’s, Prostitution or prostitutes, Violence, Death or dying, Wit or humor, Boston, Nursing or nurses, Coaching or coaches, Private schools, Vienna, Wrestling
- Locales: New York, NY, Boston, MA, Vienna, Austria, Dog’s Head Harbor, NH
From the opening passages of this novel, the reader knows that an unusual story is about to be told. The prehistory of Garp is a wildly unorthodox conception: His mother, a nurse, physically cuts a soldier making a pass at her in a motion picture theater, then conceives Garp from another, almost comatose, dying soldier. Her life story later becomes her autobiography, A Sexual Suspect, “said to bridge the usual gap between literary merit and popularity,” and it is in competition with Garp's novel, which is purely literary and not successful. Like Irving himself, the two...
[The entire page is 1064 words long]
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