John Gardner: Literary Outlaw [Hardcover]

Barry Silesky (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 5, 2004

For a decade--from 1973 to 1982--John Gardner was one of America's most famous writers and certainly its most flamboyantly opinionated. His 1973 novel, The Sunlight Dialogues, was on the New York Times bestseller list for fourteen weeks. Once in the limelight, he picked public fights with his peers, John Barth, Joseph Heller, and Norman Mailer among them, and wrote five more bestsellers.

Gardner's personal life was as chaotic as his writing life was prolific. At twenty, he married his cousin Joan, and after a long marriage that was both passionate and violent, left her for Liz Rosenberg, a student. Only a few years later, he left Rosenberg for another student, Susan Thornton. Famous for disregarding his own safety, he rode his motorcycle at crazy speeds, incurred countless concussions, and once broke both of his arms. He survived what was diagnosed as terminal colon cancer only to resume his prodigious drinking and to die in a motorcycle accident at age forty-nine, a week before his third wedding.

Biographer Barry Silesky captures John Gardner's fabulously contradictory genius and his capacity to both dazzle and infuriate. He portrays Gardner as a man of unrestrained energy and blatant contempt for convention and also as a man whose charisma drew students and devoted followers wherever he went. Amazingly, Gardner published twenty-nine books in all, including eleven fiction titles, a book-length epic poem, six books of medieval criticism, and a major biography. Twenty-one years after his death, his On Moral Fiction and The Art Of Fiction are still read and debated in MFA programs across the country.

This is a full-scale biography of a writer who was, for ten years, almost bigger than life. It lives up to its subject magnificently.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In the 1960s and '70s, when literary authors had the widespread appeal of rock stars, John Gardner was the perfect icon of the era: a highly regarded novelist who partied hard and rode a motorcycle. Silesky's briskly paced biography follows the controversial author of The Sunlight Dialogues and other bestselling and critically acclaimed novels from his rural beginnings near Batavia, N.Y., to the motorcycle accident that killed him at the age of 49, days before his third wedding. In between, Gardner led an intense, active life, producing enormous amounts of fiction and medieval scholarship, writing librettos and children's books, and editing academic journals, all the while building a highly successful teaching career in which he mentored dozens of young writers. At the root of Gardner's frenetic race toward literary greatness was, according to Silesky (Ferlinghetti: The Artist in His Times), a tragic childhood accident-his younger brother was killed by a 1,500-pound farm machine that John was driving-that left him with a deep sense of guilt and of his own mortality. In Silesky's book, the alcoholic, emotionally and physically reckless Gardner plows into his success at full speed and then summarily self-destructs. Drawing from Gardner's interviews, lectures and autobiographical fiction, as well as the testimony of friends and relatives, Silesky's account is well researched, though his dull, expository writing never delves deep. But Gardner's combination of genius and excess makes him a powerfully compelling character, and this book will pique renewed interest in his vast body of work.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School–From writing to drinking to preaching for moral art to his death at age 49 in a motorcycle accident, Gardner's life was nothing if not mythic. This fast-paced, highly readable biography draws a clear portrait of the writer as a human being. The book opens with the accidental death of his brother, Gilbert. According to Silesky, this tragedy became a source of pain that Gardner would always carry with him and one that would continually impact his fiction. After a brief detour into family background, the book traces the major points of its subject's artistic, critical, and academic life. It spends some time describing his major works, such as Grendel (Knopf, 1971), but these explications are simplified and may disappoint those looking for a more critical approach. They do, however, work well for general readers and will hopefully inspire some to search out Gardner's once-popular books. While Silesky obviously admires his subject's enormous drive and intense dedication to his art, he takes care to show how destructive this passion could be. He includes substantial quotations from family members, colleagues, and rivals, providing a balanced look at the man and his actions. He proves the real Gardner to be significantly more compelling than any myth.–Matthew L. Moffett, Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: A Shannon Ravenel Book; 1 edition (February 5, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565122186
• ISBN-13: 978-1565122185
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,389,426 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

31 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Forgive him, John, he knows not..., February 6, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: John Gardner: Literary Outlaw (Hardcover)

I have read almost everything Gardner wrote, and if you're at all like me then you've probably already read this book, JG's first major biography. You probably even enjoyed it, because you love Gardner so much, and because he's so interesting. Which makes Barry Silesky's monumental failure here so upsetting and disappointing. It is so sad that he is writing about a writer who cared massively about art's deeper thematic questions and meanings, yet Silesky himself cannot manage a single intelligent reading of one of Gardner's books. It's all none-too-bright paraphrase; when he writes about their critical reception, he quotes (I'm not exaggerating) from their paperback blurb copy. It is also sad that he is writing about a writer who loved beautiful, dense prose, yet Silesky himself writes so drably, and boringly, and unenlighteningly, that you want to spike the book. Other things: Gardner was accused of plagiarism several times (not just once, as Silesky has it), and apparently "borrowing" was central to his creative process. Fascinating notion, no? Number of pages Silesky devotes to this: 0. It is spelled Finnegans Wake, not (Jesus!) Finnegan's Wake. Fellows are not the lowest rung in the Bread Loaf hierachy, they're the second-highest. Alison Lurie and not Allison Lurie. And so on. But God love Barry Silesky: he published the thing, he talked to a lot of Gardner's friends and rivals, and people might be talking about Gardner again. But man: what a blown opportunity this book is. Someday a real artist will write about Gardner, and a great book will result. It hurt to write this; it really did. I wanted to like it so much. Respect, pity, and anger to Barry Silesky, then. May God keep him.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Bad Writer Writes about Good Writer, June 9, 2009

By 

Joan P. Gardner "Cousin" (Bennington, VT) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: John Gardner: Literary Outlaw (Hardcover)

Many years have passed since Silesky's scattered account of John Gardner's life & work was published. Alas, the confusion, garbage,& errors haven't settled into a form of truth. When Silesky wanted a writer to profile, he admitted to the 2 Gardner friends who recommended John that he had read almost nothing of Gardner's work. Now there was a red light already!
(NOTE: John & I were 1st cousins, had been married for more than 23 years--between the ages of 19 $ 43; I was the mother of his 2 children; I didn't want to contribute, partly because I was writing my own memoir for our own family; I was extricated from the marriage & was more than ready for a sane, calm life.)
Having read some of Silesky's other writings, it's clear that he was not the one for the job; his own writing & critical education were less than moderate, to be blunt. During the course of his project, he wanted me to answer questions and give him more information, which I did not want to do since it was his job to do the research & write the book. I did agree to vet some of his findings & verify/modify some of the more outrageous claims.)
He set forth on a trek to visit many of the places where we'd lived, where he interviewed people from the past who had their own axes & violins to grind. People who hadn't even known John or me personally had plenty to say; we're talking tabloid quality here. Many of the people who really knew us had either passed on or had gone on to higher ivory towers. Others wouldn't talk to him. Somehow in the gossip pit he neglected the good times and the actual writing--John's important work.
So this is not a complete picture, by any means. Most people agree that John was a wonderful, dedicated teacher, generous with his time. They also agree that he was a fine, prolific writer of all kinds of books. They know that he was a personal mess, & he could make your own life one. But John, once an innocent, loving farmboy, developed into a bi-polar nutbag who lost his sense and his life in ignominious fashion. Striving to be the Ren Man was taxing, & he paid the ultimate price.
Yes, it was more than sad that John Gardner became Grendel, but he deserved a better biographer.

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Shaggy & Unconventional Writer, March 22, 2004

By 

Elizabeth Connor (Charleston, SC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: John Gardner: Literary Outlaw (Hardcover)

John Champlin Gardner grew up near Batavia, a rural community located nearly halfway between Buffalo and Rochester, New York. The tragic loss of his fearless brother Gilbert in a farming accident shaped his outlook on life and death, figured thematically in several of his life's works, and may have contributed to his own accident-prone and reckless nature. Inside and outside the classroom, shaggy and unconventional Gardner inspired legions of fledgling writers. Some of his more notable students included Raymond Carver, Charles Richard Johnson, and Richard Russo. Gardner was associated with a number of teaching institutions (Oberlin, Chico State, San Francisco State, Southern Illinois at Carbondale, Bennington, SUNY Binghamton) in his prolific but beleaguered career as a medievalist, fabulist, poet, novelist, librettist, playwright, literary critic, creative writing teacher, and translator. Grendel, his retelling of the Beowulf epic through the eyes of the monster, is considered one of his greatest works. October Light won the National Book Critic's Circle Award in 1976. Several books have analyzed Gardner's oeuvre and described aspects of his outrageous life but this folksy but gripping book is the first full-length biography. In 2000, Gardner's fiancée and former writing student Susan Thornton published On Broken Glass: Loving and Losing John Gardner, a memoir of their brief time together. To quote Gardner, "Spending a lifetime writing novels is hard enough to justify in any case, but spending a lifetime writing novels nobody wants is much harder." In 1982, the world of little literary magazines and writing workshops lost a giant as great as Grendel when Gardner died at age 49 in a motorcycle accident.