The World According to Garp de John Irving - 1978

VERY GOOD condition — DUST JACKET: Minor wear & tear to top and bottom edges of spine, panels, folds and flaps, primarily laminate face. BOARDS: Very minor soiling/scuffing front and back. BOOK: Pencil mark ghosts to FFEP. Lean to spine. Please inspect photos closely for condition details.

Here on offer is a very nice copy of John Irving's award-winning book, The World According to Garp, his fourth novel and a consistent bestseller for years. This is a true 1st American edition, 1st printing of the work published by E. P. Dutton in 1978. The original dust jacket is protected from further wear by a Brodart sleeve.

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" 'The World According to Garp' is a comic and compassionate coming-of-age novel that established John Irving as one of the most imaginative writers of his generation. A worldwide bestseller since its publication in 1978, Irving's classic is filled with stories inside stories about the life and times of T. S. Garp, novelist and bastard son of Jenny Fields--a feminist leader ahead of her time. Beyond that, The World According to Garp virtually defies synopsis.

----'Nothing in contemporary fiction matches it,' said critic Terrence Des Pres. 'Irving's blend of gravity and play is unique, audacious, almost blasphemous. . . . Friendship, marriage and family are his primary themes, but at that blundering level of life where mishap and folly--something close to joyful malice--perpetually intrude and disrupt, often fatally. Life, in Irving's fiction, is always under siege.' Time magazine commented: 'Irving's popularity is not hard to understand. His world is really the world according to nearly everyone'."

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"John Winslow Irving (born John Wallace Blunt Jr.; March 2, 1942) is an American-Canadian novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter.

Irving achieved critical and popular acclaim after the international success of The World According to Garp in 1978. Many of Irving's novels, including The Hotel New Hampshire (1981), The Cider House Rules (1985), A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), and A Widow for One Year (1998), have been bestsellers. He won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in the 72nd Academy Awards (1999) for his script of The Cider House Rules.

Five of his novels have been adapted into films (Garp, Hotel, Meany, Cider, Widow). Several of Irving's books (Garp, Meany, Widow) and short stories have been set in and around Phillips Exeter Academy in the town of Exeter, New Hampshire. . . .

Since the publication of Garp made him independently wealthy, Irving has sporadically accepted short-term teaching positions (including one at his alma mater, the Iowa Writers' Workshop) and served as an assistant coach on his sons' high school wrestling teams. (Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame as an "Outstanding American" in 1992.) In addition to his novels, he has also published Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (1996), a collection of his writings including a brief memoir and unpublished short fiction. . . .

In July 2018, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize announced Irving would be the recipient of the 2018 Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award at its annual gala October 28, 2018, in Dayton, Ohio. . . . "

The above text was taken from, respectively, Modern Library publishers (via Google Books) and Wikipedia.