“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 de

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First published 06 May 2004

Citation: Warde, William. "Donald Barthelme". The Literary Encyclopedia. 6 May 2004.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=280, accessed 20 November 2009.]