Donald Barthelme

William Warde (University of North Texas)
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“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

2352 words

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 07 November 2024.]

280 Donald Barthelme 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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