John Irving

Best-selling author John Irving will introduce ALA Annual Conference attendees to his thirteenth and latest novel, In One Person, due to be published in May 2012. The novel is described as his most political since The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany, offering an unforgettable portrait of the solitariness of a bisexual man dedicated to making himself “worthwhile.”

Advance praise for In One Person includes this from Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone and My Own Country: “This tender exploration of nascent desire, of love and loss, manages to be sweeping, brilliant, political, provocative, tragic, and funny—it is precisely the kind of astonishing alchemy we associate with a John Irving novel. The unfolding of the AIDS epidemic in the United States in the ’80s was the defining moment for me as a physician. . . . In One Person is the novel that for me will define that era. A profound truth is arrived at in these pages. It is Irving at his most daring, at his most ambitious. It is America and American writing, both at their very best.”

The World According to Garp, which won the National Book Award in 1980, was John Irving’s fourth novel and his first international bestseller; it also became a George Roy Hill film. Irving’s novels are now translated into 35 languages. Worldwide, the Irving novel most often called “an American classic” is A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), the portrayal of an enduring friendship at that time when the Vietnam War had its most divisive effect on the US. Less commonly known is that Irving competed as a wrestler for 20 years, coached the sport until he was 47, and was inducted in 1992 into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, OK. In 2000, he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules.

The author appears courtesy of Simon & Schuster.

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