John Irving

An international bestseller since its publication in 1978, The World According to Garp established John Irving as one of the most imaginative writers of his generation. This is the life of T. S. Garp, the bastard son of Jenny Fields--a feminist leader ahead of her times. This is the life and death of a famous mother …

In 1954, in the cookhouse of a logging and sawmill settlement in northern New Hampshire, an anxious twelve-year-old boy mistakes the local constable’s girlfriend for a bear. Both the twelve-year-old and his father become fugitives, forced to run from Coos County—to Boston, to southern Vermont, to Toronto—pursued by …

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 …