Donald Barthelme Jr. (pronounced BAR-thəl-mee; April 7, 1931 – July 23, 1989) was an American short story writer and novelist known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, was managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1961–1962), co-founder of Fiction (with Mark Mirsky and the assistance of Max and Marianne Frisch), and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.

Early life

Donald Barthelme was born in Philadelphia in 1931. His father and mother were fellow students at the University of Pennsylvania. The family moved to Texas two years later and Barthelme's father became a professor of architecture at the University of Houston, where Barthelme would later study journalism. Barthelme won a Scholastic Writing Award in Short Story in 1949, while a student at Lamar High School in Houston. (Barthelme also attended St. Thomas Catholic High School in Houston.)

Career

Barthelme went on to teach for brief periods at Boston University, University at Buffalo, and the City College of New York, where he served as distinguished visiting professor from 1974 to 1975.

Writing

In 1961 he became director of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; he published his first short story the same year. His New Yorker publication, "L'Lapse", a parody of Michelangelo Antonioni's film L'Eclisse (The Eclipse), followed in 1963. The magazine would go on to publish much of Barthelme's early output, including such now-famous stories as "Me and Miss Mandible", the tale of a 35-year-old sent to elementary school by either a clerical error, failing at his job as an insurance adjuster, or failing in his marriage. Written in October 1960, it was the first of his stories to be published. "A Shower of Gold", another early short story, portrays a sculptor who agrees to appear on the existentialist game show Who Am I? In 1964, Barthelme collected his early stories in Come Back, Dr. Caligari, for which he received considerable critical acclaim as an innovator of the short story form. His style—fictional and popular figures in absurd situations, e.g., the Batman-inspired "The Joker's Greatest Triumph"—spawned a number of imitators and helped to define the next several decades of short fiction.

Barthelme continued his success in the short story form with Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968). One widely anthologized story from this collection, "The Balloon", appears to reflect on Barthelme's intentions as an artist. The narrator inflates a giant, irregular balloon over most of Manhattan, causing widely divergent reactions in the populace. Children play across its top, enjoying it literally on a surface level; adults attempt to read meaning into it but are baffled by its ever-changing shape; the authorities attempt to destroy it but fail. In the final paragraph, the reader learns that the narrator has inflated the balloon for purely personal reasons, and he sees no intrinsic meaning in the balloon itself. Other notable stories from this collection include "The Indian Uprising", a mad collage of a Comanche attack on a modern city, and "Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning", a series of vignettes showing the difficulties of truly knowing a public figure. The latter story appeared in print only two months before Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 assassination.

Barthelme went on to write over a hundred more short stories, first collected in City Life (1970), Sadness (1972), Amateurs (1976), Great Days (1979), and Overnight to Many Distant Cities (1983). Many of these stories were later reprinted and slightly revised for the collections Sixty Stories (1981), Forty Stories (1987), and posthumously, Flying to America (2007). Though primarily known for these stories, Barthelme also produced four novels: Snow White (1967), The Dead Father (1975), Paradise (1986), and The King (1990, posthumous).

Barthelme also wrote the non-fiction book Guilty Pleasures (1974). His other writings have been posthumously gathered into two collections, The Teachings of Don B.: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme (1992) and Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews (1997). With his daughter, he wrote the children's book The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine, which received the 1972 National Book Award in category Children's Books. Barthelme's thoughts and work were largely the result of 20th-century angst

Influences

In a 1971–1972 interview with Jerome Klinkowitz (now collected in Not-Knowing), Barthelme provides a list of favorite writers, both influential figures from the past and contemporary writers he admired. Throughout other interviews in the same collection, Barthelme reiterates a number of the same names and also mentions several others, occasionally expanding on why these writers were important for him. In a 1975 interview for Pacifica Radio, Barthelme stresses that, for him, Beckett is foremost among his literary predecessors, What follows is a partial list gleaned from the interviews.

  • François Rabelais
  • Arthur Rimbaud
  • Heinrich von Kleist
  • Franz Kafka
  • Gertrude Stein
  • Flann O'Brien
  • Samuel Beckett
  • William H. Gass
  • Rafael Sabatini
  • S. J. Perelman
  • Ann Beattie
  • Walker Percy
  • Gabriel García Márquez
  • John Barth
  • Thomas Pynchon
  • Kenneth Koch
  • John Ashbery
  • Grace Paley
  • Machado de Assis

Barthelme was also quite interested in and influenced by a number of contemporary artists, particularly the "found object" collage techniques of Robert Rauschenberg.

  • 1972 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters
  • 1976 Jesse H Jones Award from Texas Institute of Letters, for The Dead Father
  • 1982:
  • (nomination) National Book Critics Circle Award for Sixty Stories
  • PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Sixty Stories
  • 1988 Rea Award for the Short Story

Notes

References

Further reading

  • Donald Barthelme by Jessamyn West (librarian) —with some reprints
  • Donald Barthelme at The Scriptorium, The Modern Word
  • "About the Pointlessness of Patricide: A Lacanian Reading of Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father" , Santiago Juan-Navarro, Estudos Anglo-Americanos, 1990–1991
  • Audio interview of Donald Barthelme by Stephen Banker, circa 1978. At YouTube, accessed 5/23/2026
  • Barthelme interviewed & reading his work (Charles Ruas Archives)
  • Barthelme, the Houstonian by Susan Choi. The Paris Review, May 22, 2026