“Perpetual worrier, patron of the misfit/ and misguided, the oddball, the longshot, irreverent black sheep in every family. . . ”. This is how the poet and scholar Edward Hirsch begins his “Apostrophe” to Donald Barthelme in the February 17, 1992, issue of The New Republic. And rightly so, as this picture describes a writer who challenged and changed the nature of then-contemporary experimental fiction with his energetic and challenging experiments.
The critic 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.” And Barthelme has been described in many other ways, such as in an article in Harper's where Josephine Henden classified him as a an angry sado-masochistic...
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Citation: Warde, William. "Donald Barthelme". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 06 May 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=280, accessed 05 December 2025.]
