John Gardner: Remembering a passionate, controversial advocate for writers and fiction

<p>In the 1970s, John Gardner was a star in the world of literary fiction, often mentioned in the same breath as Norman Mailer, John Updike, and Kurt Vonnegut. He won huge acclaim for his 1971 novel, Grendel, a post-modern retelling of the Beowulf legend. And in 1976, he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for October Light, the story of two elderly Vermont siblings waging a war of wills inside their ramshackle home.</p> <p>Gardner was also a leading force in the movement to establish creative writing in college curricula. For over 20 years, he taught writing at universities across the country, providing crucial early guidance to Raymond Carver, Charles Johnson, and many other notables. Gardner published early works by Joyce Carol Oates, William Gass, and others in MSS, the literary magazine he founded in the early 1960s and revived almost 20 years later. And his two books on craft and the writing life, The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist, are now considered classics.</p> <p>But as quickly as Gardner’s star had risen, it began to fall. In 1978, he published “On Moral Fiction,” a literary manifesto in which he criticized many of the most famous writers of his generation. Decrying “tinny” and “commercial” fiction, Gardner called for writing that affirms life. A year earlier, Gardner also faced charges of plagiarism, over his book-length biography of Chaucer.</p> <p>Born and raised in rural Batavia, New York, Gardner was the oldest of three children and his parents’ favorite; but his life changed forever on a fateful day in April 1945. Gardner, then 11, was driving a tractor pulling a cultipacker, a large device for flattening soil, with his 6-year-old brother, Gilbert, riding on back. The tractor stopped suddenly, but the cultipacker kept moving, and Gilbert was thrown beneath the steel rollers. Gardner was haunted by the tragic accident throughout his life, retelling the events in his powerful  short story “Redemption.”</p> <p>In August 1982, Gardner was a lead instructor at the Bread Loaf Writers