John Irving
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''."John Irving 1999 Acceptance Speech on Winning the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay" ''oscars.org'' Five of his novels have been adapted into films (''Garp'', ''H ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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A Prayer For Owen Meany
''A Prayer for Owen Meany'' is the seventh novel by American writer John Irving. Published in 1989, it tells the story of John Wheelwright and his best friend Owen Meany growing up together in a small New Hampshire town during the 1950s and 1960s. According to John's narration, Owen is a remarkable boy in many ways; he believes himself to be God's instrument and sets out to fulfill the fate he has prophesied for himself. The novel is also an homage to Günter Grass's most famous novel, ''The Tin Drum''. Grass was a great influence for John Irving, as well as a close friend. The main characters of both novels, Owen Meany and Oskar Matzerath, share the same initials as well as some other characteristics, and their stories show some parallels. Irving has confirmed the similarities. ''A Prayer for Owen Meany'', however, follows an independent and separate plot. Plot summary The story is narrated by John Wheelwright, a former citizen of New Hampshire who has become a voluntary expatria ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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:Template:Infobox Writer/doc
Infobox writer may be used to summarize information about a person who is a writer/author (includes screenwriters). If the writer-specific fields here are not needed, consider using the more general ; other infoboxes there can be found in :People and person infobox templates. This template may also be used as a module (or sub-template) of ; see WikiProject Infoboxes/embed for guidance on such usage. Syntax The infobox may be added by pasting the template as shown below into an article. All fields are optional. Any unused parameter names can be left blank or omitted. Parameters Please remove any parameters from an article's infobox that are unlikely to be used. All parameters are optional. Unless otherwise specified, if a parameter has multiple values, they should be comma-separated using the template: : which produces: : , language= If any of the individual values contain commas already, add to use semi-colons as separators: : which produces: : , ps ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Academy Award For Best Adapted Screenplay
The Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay is the Academy Award for the best screenplay adapted from previously established material. The most frequently adapted media are novels, but other adapted narrative formats include stage plays, musicals, short stories, TV series, and even other films and film characters. All sequels are also considered adaptations by this standard (based on the story and characters set forth in the original film). Prior to its current name, this award had been known as the Academy Award for Best Screenplay Based On Material From Another Medium. See also the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, the corresponding award for scripts with original stories. Superlatives The first person to win twice in this category was Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who won the award in two consecutive years, 1949 and 1950. Others to win twice in this category include: George Seaton, Robert Bolt (who also won in consecutive years), Francis Ford Coppola, Mario Puzo, Alvi ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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The 158-Pound Marriage
''The 158-Pound Marriage'' is the third novel by American author John Irving. The book explores the sexual revolution-era trend of " swinging" (partner-swapping) via a glimpse into the lives of two couples in a small New England college town who enter casually into such an affair, with disastrous consequences. Plot summary The narrator (who never identifies himself by name) is a college professor and a relatively unsuccessful author of historical novels. While doing research in Vienna, Austria, he met Utch, an orphaned survivor of the German occupation and the Russian siege at the end of World War II. At the opening of the novel, the narrator and Utch are married with two children and live a relatively placid existence until, at a faculty party, they become acquainted with Severin Winter, a Viennese-born professor of German and coach of the school's wrestling team, and his wife Edith, a WASP from a privileged background (she met her husband in Vienna while on a buying trip for MO ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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The Water-Method Man
''The Water Method Man'' (1972) is the second published novel by American novelist John Irving. Plot summary The novel revolves around the mishaps of its narrator, Fred Trumper, a floundering late-twenty-something graduate student with serious commitment and honesty issues that earn him the nickname "Bogus." The novel shows Irving beginning to develop a blend of comedy and pathos, as well as a penchant for fashioning quirky characters. It follows a non-linear narrative in the form of a sort of 'confession' authored by Trumper, who humorously recounts his various failures in life and love, from his New England childhood through his experiences on foreign study in Vienna, Austria, and as a graduate student in Iowa, leading up to the present-action setting, early-1970s New York, where Trumper is attempting to sever himself from his adolescent past. "I want to change", Trumper says at the end of Chapter One. The phrase seems to be the novel's central theme. The title refers to a me ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Iowa Writers' Workshop
The Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa, is a celebrated graduate-level creative writing program in the United States. The writer Lan Samantha Chang is its director. Graduates earn a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in Creative Writing. It has been cited as the best graduate writing program in the nation, counting among its alumni 17 Pulitzer Prize winners. History *The program began in 1936 with the gathering of poets and fiction writers under the direction of Wilbur Schramm. *The workshop's second director, from 1941 to 1965, was Paul Engle, a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, native. Under his tenure, the Writers' Workshop became a national landmark. He successfully secured donations for the workshop from the business community for about 20 years, including locals such as Maytag and Quaker Oats, as well as U.S. Steel and ''Reader's Digest''. Between 1953 and 1956, the Rockefeller Foundation donated $40,000. Henry Luce, the publisher of ''TIME'' and ''Life'' magazines, and ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American writer known for his satirical and darkly humorous novels. In a career spanning over 50 years, he published fourteen novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction works; further collections have been published after his death. Born and raised in Indianapolis, Vonnegut attended Cornell University but withdrew in January 1943 and enlisted in the US Army. As part of his training, he studied mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and the University of Tennessee. He was then deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was interned in Dresden, where he survived the Allied bombing of the city in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned. After the war, he married Jane Marie Cox, with whom he had three children. He adopted his nephews after his siste ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Setting Free The Bears
''Setting Free the Bears'' is the first novel by American author John Irving, published in 1968 by Random House. Irving studied at the Institute of European Studies in Vienna in 1963, and ''Bears'' was written between 1965 and 1967 based largely on Irving's understanding of the city and its rebellious youth of the 1960s. The original manuscript for the book was submitted as his Master's thesis at the University of Iowa's Writer's Workshop in 1967, and was later expanded and revised to its published version. Synopsis The book's central plot concerns a plan to liberate all the animals from the Vienna Zoo as happened just after the conclusion of World War II. Irving's two protagonists—Graff, a young Austrian college student, and Siggy, an eccentric motorcycle mechanic-cum-philosopher—meet and embark on an adventure-filled motorcycle tour of Austria before the novel's climax: "the great zoo bust". Toward the middle of the book, the two protagonists go their separate ways, and a ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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United States Army Air Forces
The United States Army Air Forces (USAAF or AAF) was the major land-based aerial warfare service component of the United States Army and ''de facto'' aerial warfare service branch of the United States during and immediately after World War II (1941–1945). It was created on 20 June 1941 as successor to the previous United States Army Air Corps and is the direct predecessor of the United States Air Force, today one of the six United States Armed Forces, armed forces of the United States. The AAF was a component of the United States Army, which on 2 March 1942 was divided functionally by executive order into three autonomous forces: the Army Ground Forces, the United States Army Services of Supply (which in 1943 became the Army Service Forces), and the Army Air Forces. Each of these forces had a commanding general who reported directly to the Chief of Staff of the United States Army, Army Chief of Staff. The AAF administered all parts of military aviation formerly distributed am ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Frederick Buechner
Carl Frederick Buechner ( ; July 11, 1926 – August 15, 2022) was an American author, Presbyterianism, Presbyterian Minister (Christianity), minister, preacher, and theologian. The author of thirty-nine published books, his work encompassed different genres, including fiction, autobiography, essays and sermons, and his career spanned more than six decades. He was best known for his novels, including ''A Long Day's Dying'', ''The Book of Bebb'', ''Godric (novel), Godric'' (1981 Pulitzer Prize finalist), and ''Brendan (novel), Brendan'', his memoirs, including The Sacred Journey, ''The Sacred Journey'' and ''Telling Secrets (memoir), Telling Secrets,'' and his theological works, such as ''Secrets in the Dark: a life in sermons, Secrets in the Dark'', ''The Magnificent Defeat'', and ''Telling the Truth: the Gospel as tragedy, comedy, and fairy tale, Telling the Truth''. Buechner was named "without question one of the truly great writers of the 20th century" by viaLibri, a "major ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Assistant Coach
A sports coach is a person coaching in sport, involved in the direction, instruction and training of a sports team or athlete. History The original sense of the word ''coach'' is that of a Coach (carriage), horse-drawn carriage, deriving ultimately from the Hungarian city of Kocs where such vehicles were first made. Students at the University of Oxford in the early nineteenth century used the slang word to refer to a private tutor who would drive a less able student through his examinations just like horse driving. Britain took the lead in upgrading the status of sports in the 19th century. For sports to become professionalized, "coacher" had to become established. It gradually professionalized in the Victorian era and the role was well established by 1914. In the First World War, military units sought out the coaches to supervise physical conditioning and develop morale-building teams. Effectiveness John Wooden had a philosophy of coaching that encouraged planning, organizat ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Student Athlete
A student is a person enrolled in a school or other educational institution. In the United Kingdom and most commonwealth countries, a "student" attends a secondary school or higher (e.g., college or university); those in primary or elementary schools are "pupils". Africa Nigeria In Nigeria, education is classified into four system known as a 6-3-3-4 system of education. It implies six years in primary school, three years in junior secondary, three years in senior secondary and four years in the university. However, the number of years to be spent in university is mostly determined by the course of study. Some courses have longer study length than others. Those in primary school are often referred to as pupils. Those in university, as well as those in secondary school, are referred to as students. The Nigerian system of education also has other recognized categories like the polytechnics and colleges of education. The Polytechnic gives out National Diploma and Higher Natio ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |