Murakami admires Irving for his storytelling abilities, and has translated some of his novels into Japanese.
Hansen studied with John Irving at Iowa, and claims that he learned about narrative technique from him.
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Irving is often compared to Dickens, and indeed, when he was a boy, he read Dickens's novels voraciously, and says that GREAT EXPECTATIONS inspired him to be a writer.
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"My novels, and that film, are written deliberately--negatively, you would say manipulatively--to move you. It is my intention to emotionally affect a reader or an audience. And I'm unashamed in that intention. In fact, I believe that films and books that don't try to make you love the characters in them or feel pain at what happens are easy ways out of storytelling."
"I write first drafts longhand. Once I have a first draft of something and it begins to move with a little more pace, then I go to the typewriter. There's a kind of comfort to starting something with a pen. I like pens, I like pencils, I like the crossing out of things, the changing of pen colors. I like leaving those traces on a page."
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Irving attended Phillips Exeter Academy, where his stepfather was a teacher of Russian history. More interested in wrestling than in his studies (he is now a member of the Wrestling Hall of Fame), Irving attended three colleges (including a brief stay in Vienna) before graduating in 1965 from the University of New Hampshire. In 1967 he received an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. Irving's fourth novel, THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP (1968), was a resounding success, as was the 1982 film based on more...
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03/02/1942 New Hampshire, New England, Northeastern States, United States,
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It was a howl.