John Irving comes to Iowa

 Tues 2023 Sept 26

The exciting news is that well known author John Irving is coming to Iowa to speak at Hancher Auditorium in Iowa City next month.  Even better news, all of the seats are free because the University hosts a free lecture series and this is one of them.   

The bad news is that as of today, Sept 26, all of the seats are "sold out".  A pox upon those who just told me about it and got me all excited about attending.  Irving is scheduled to give his lecture on Friday the 13th, in October.  My poor luck.

I have only read a couple of novels by John Irving but  I liked them very much.  They were The World According to Garp (1978), and Cider House Rules (1985).  If you are a fan of the Goodreads website, you may be interested to know that both books received a 4.1 average rating.  This was based on 224,000+ ratings of The World According to Garp, and 181,000 ratings for Cider House Rules.  

John Irving studied at the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa under now famous writer Kurt Vonnegut from 1965-1967.  He later taught at the Iowa Writer's Workshop 1972-1975.  FYI, I was attending the University of Iowa during some of those years but never met the man.  

John Irving was also a wrestling coach, and during the time that he was at Iowa he hung out with Dan Gable (who had just been hired to be an assistant coach) and worked out with him.  Irving includes the theme of wrestling and wrestlers in many of his books.  In this photo of the two men working out, Dan Gable is the one doing the leg sweep, and John Irving is the one with the grimace.



Dan Gable and John Irving, 1973

See Reference 2 below


Although I never met John Irving or Kurt Vonnegut, I did go to a party at a house once owned by Kurt Vonnegut on the north side of downtown IC.  I had befriended  a woman who was in the Writer's Workshop who invited me to one of their parties in the house.  She also became somewhat famous with a book that made the New York Times bestseller list and was later made into a movie.  The Memory Keeper's Daughter  received a 3.69 average rating of 595,000+ ratings on Goodreads.

I read that John Irving held down three jobs at one time in Iowa City, one of them was shelving books in the library.  He is now 81 years old.

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1- John Irving's Iowa City, Iowa Magazine online, 3-06-2023

2- Grappling with Greatness, Iowa Magazine online  3-06-2023


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the "Kurt Vonnegut House"

photo by Winston Barclay




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