Donald Barthelme

Who Was Donald Barthelme?

Donald Barthelme was the most stylistically inventive and formally radical of the American postmodernist short story writers — a writer whose work in The New Yorker and in a series of story collections from the 1960s through the 1980s redefined what the short story could do and be. Born in Philadelphia, raised in Houston, educated at the University of Houston, he worked as a journalist and museum director before his fiction brought him to New York and to The New Yorker, where he published for the rest of his career.

Barthelme’s fiction is characterized by fragmentation, collage, and the juxtaposition of radically different registers of language — bureaucratic prose, fairy tale conventions, philosophical discourse, advertising copy — in ways that produce effects of comedy, melancholy, and estrangement simultaneously. His collections — Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964), Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968), City Life (1970), Sixty Stories (1981) — established him as one of the defining voices of his literary generation.

Barthelme was raised Catholic and never entirely left Catholicism behind, even as his fiction became increasingly secular and ironic. Questions of guilt, meaning, the absence of God, and the ruins of religious culture recur throughout his work, often in the mode of melancholy comedy that is his most characteristic register.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Come Back, Dr. Caligari — 1964 — stories
• Snow White — 1967 — novel
• Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts — 1968 — stories
• City Life — 1970 — stories
• Sixty Stories — 1981
• The Dead Father — 1975 — novel