Suggestions
Use up and down arrows to review and enter to select.Please wait while we process your payment
If you don't see it, please check your spam folder. Sometimes it can end up there.
If you don't see it, please check your spam folder. Sometimes it can end up there.
Please wait while we process your payment
By signing up you agree to our terms and privacy policy.
Don’t have an account? Subscribe now
Create Your Account
Sign up for your FREE 7-day trial
Already have an account? Log in
Your Email
Choose Your Plan
Save over 50% with a SparkNotes PLUS Annual Plan!
Purchasing SparkNotes PLUS for a group?
Get Annual Plans at a discount when you buy 2 or more!
Price
$24.99 $18.74 /subscription + tax
Subtotal $37.48 + tax
Save 25% on 2-49 accounts
Save 30% on 50-99 accounts
Want 100 or more? Contact us for a customized plan.
Your Plan
Payment Details
Payment Summary
SparkNotes Plus
You'll be billed after your free trial ends.
7-Day Free Trial
Not Applicable
Renews June 17, 2023 June 10, 2023
Discounts (applied to next billing)
DUE NOW
US $0.00
SNPLUSROCKS20 | 20% Discount
This is not a valid promo code.
Discount Code (one code per order)
SparkNotes Plus subscription is $4.99/month or $24.99/year as selected above. The free trial period is the first 7 days of your subscription. TO CANCEL YOUR SUBSCRIPTION AND AVOID BEING CHARGED, YOU MUST CANCEL BEFORE THE END OF THE FREE TRIAL PERIOD. You may cancel your subscription on your Subscription and Billing page or contact Customer Support at custserv@bn.com. Your subscription will continue automatically once the free trial period is over. Free trial is available to new customers only.
Choose Your Plan
For the next 7 days, you'll have access to awesome PLUS stuff like AP English test prep, No Fear Shakespeare translations and audio, a note-taking tool, personalized dashboard, & much more!
You’ve successfully purchased a group discount. Your group members can use the joining link below to redeem their group membership. You'll also receive an email with the link.
Members will be prompted to log in or create an account to redeem their group membership.
Thanks for creating a SparkNotes account! Continue to start your free trial.
Please wait while we process your payment
Your PLUS subscription has expired
Please wait while we process your payment
Please wait while we process your payment
John Champlin Gardner was born in Batavia, New York, on July 21, 1933, to John Champlin, a dairy farmer and lay Presbyterian preacher, and Priscilla Gardner, an English teacher. A few months before his twelfth birthday, Gardner inadvertently killed his younger brother Gilbert in a gruesome accident, running him over with a heavy farm machine. The incident haunted Gardner for the rest of his life in the form of nightmares and flashbacks, and the deep psychological wound it caused inspired and informed much of Gardner’s work, particularly the posthumously published novel Stillness (1986).
In his youth, Gardner developed an interest in cartoons and comics, and that medium’s fantastic, over-the-top quality pervades his fiction. Gardner often uses grotesque, cartoonish imagery to distance readers emotionally from his characters, to avoid overly sentimental interpretations. An avid cartoonist and illustrator himself, Gardner insisted that all his novels written for the Knopf publishing firm be illustrated. Grendel (1971), for example, features the nearly abstract woodcuts of Emil Antonucci, which serve to enhance the novel’s surreal, fanciful tone.
Gardner graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Washington University in St. Louis in 1955 and then attended the University of Iowa for graduate study. At Iowa he studied medieval literature and creative writing, eventually combining his two academic interests in his doctoral dissertation, a novel called The Old Men. Gardner accepted a teaching position at Oberlin College in Ohio directly after leaving Iowa and continued to teach at various universities for the rest of his life. He gained prominence as a teacher of creative writing, particularly at institutions such as the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in Middlebury, Vermont.
Gardner was a prolific and mercurial writer, producing a remarkable thirty-five volumes in just twenty-five years. The breadth of his output is equally impressive: though most noted for his novels, Gardner also published poetry, plays, short stories, opera librettos, scholarly texts, and children’s picture books. Even his novels do not share a coherent, sustained style or tone: they vary from the highly stylized, densely allusive Grendel to more traditionally realist works such as Nickel Mountain (1973). Critical response to Gardner’s work was equally divided, and throughout his publishing career the release of a new Gardner work was an occasion for much critical debate. Grendel was, in fact, the first and only Gardner volume to receive near-unanimous critical acclaim, though three of his novels—The Sunlight Dialogues (1972), Nickel Mountain, and October Light (1976)—were popular bestsellers.
Gardner’s perhaps most vexing publication is his literary manifesto On Moral Fiction (1978), in which the author calls for art that uplifts and celebrates faith, decrying the mass of contemporary literature as too cynical and fatalistic. The book’s self-aggrandizing, moralistic tone enraged and inflamed the normally rarefied literary community, and it sparked a nationwide debate that was played out in the popular media. Reviewers attacked not only what they saw as smugness in Gardner, but also what they perceived as shoddy reasoning and messy scholarship. Perhaps the most damaging effect of the publication of On Moral Fiction, though, has been the subsequent tendency to read Gardner’s own philosophically provocative and complex novels through the straitlaced moral frameworks presented in the poorly received On Moral Fiction.
Gardner published several more works after the publicity disaster of On Moral Fiction, but, apart from Freddy’s Book (1980), none were particularly well received. Gardner died in a motorcycle accident near Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, on September 14, 1982.
Read about whether it is accurate to call Gardner as a postmodern author.
Grendel, one of Gardner’s more stylistically and thematically postmodern novels, is an example of a metafiction—fiction about fiction. The plot and characters of the novel come from the 6th-century Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, a text that Gardner had been teaching at the university level for some time. Beowulf is a heroic epic chronicling the illustrious deeds of the great Geatish warrior Beowulf, who voyages across the sea to rid the Danes of a horrible monster, Grendel, who has been terrorizing their kingdom.
Gardner’s twist on the tale is his choice to narrate the story from the monster’s point of view, transforming a snarling, terrible beast into a lonely but intelligent outsider who bears a striking resemblance to his human adversaries. In his retelling of the Beowulf story, Gardner comments not only on the Anglo-Saxon civilization and moral code the original poem depicts, but also on the human condition more generally.
Please wait while we process your payment