The Cider House Rules - John Irving - Author Biography • Where—Exeter, New Hampshire, USA • Education—B.A., University of New Hampshire; M.F.A., Iowa Writers' Workshop • Awards—American Book Award (Garp); Academy Award; Best Screenplay (Cider House) • Currently—lives in Vermont John Irving is an American novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter. Irving achieved critical and popular acclaim in 1978 after the international success of The World According to Garp in 1978. A number of of his novels, such as The Cider House Rules (1985), A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), and A Widow for One Year (1998), have been bestsellers. He won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1999 for his script The Cider House Rules. Early years and career Irving was born John Wallace Blunt, Jr. in Exeter, New Hampshire, the son of Helen Frances (nee Winslow) and John Wallace Blunt, Sr., a writer and executive recruiter.

The couple parted during pregnancy, and Irving grew as the stepson of a Phillips Exeter Academy faculty member, Colin Franklin Newell Irving (as well as the nephew of another faculty member, H. Hamilton "Hammy" Bissell). Irving attended Phillips Exeter and participated in school wrestling program, both as a student athlete and as assistant coach. Wrestling features prominently in his books, stories, and life. Irving's biological father, a World War II pilot, was shot down over Burma in 1943, although he survived. Irving learned of his father's heroism only in 1981 and incorporated the incident into The Cider House Rules. He never met has father, however, even though on occasion Blunt attended his son's wrestling competitions. Irving's published his first novel, Setting Free the Bears (1968) when he was only 26. The book was reasonably well reviewed but failed to gain a large readership. In the late 1960s, he studied with Kurt Vonnegut at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

His second and third novels, The Water-Method Man (1972) and The 158-Pound Marriage (1974), were similarly received. In 1975, Irving accepted a position as assistant professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. World According to Garp Frustrated at the lack of promotion his novels were receiving from Random House, his first publisher, Irving moved to Dutton. Dutton made a strong commitment to his new novel—The World According to Garp (1978), and the book became an international bestseller and cultural phenomenon. It was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 1979 but won the award the following year when the paperback edition was issued. The film version of Garp came out in 1982 with Robin Williams in the title role and Glenn Close as his mother; it garnered several Academy Award nominations, including nominations for Close and John Lithgow. Irving makes a brief cameo in the film as an official in one of Garp's high school wrestling matches. After Garp Garp transformed Irving from an obscure, academic literary writer to a household name, and his subsequent books were bestsellers.

The next was The Hotel New Hampshire (1981), which sold well despite mixed reviews from critics. It, too, was adapted to film, starring Jodie Foster, Rob Lowe, and Beau Bridges. Irving also received the 1981 O. Henry Award for "Interior Space," a short story published in Fiction magazine in 1980. In 1985, Irving published The Cider House Rules. An epic set in a Maine orphanage, the novel's central topic is abortion. Many drew parallels between the novel and Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist (1838). It took Irving nearly 10 years to develop the screenplay for Cider House, and the film—starring Michael Caine, Tobey Maguire, and Charlize Theron—was released in 1998. It was nominated for several Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and earned Irving an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. In 1989, four years after publishing Cider House, Irving came out with A Prayer for Owen Meany, also set in a New England boarding school (and Toronto).

The novel was influenced by Gunter Grass's 1959 The Tin Drum, and contains allusions to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and works of Dickens. Owen Meany was Irving's best selling book since Garp and, today, remains on many high school reading lists. That book, too, was later adapted to film: the 1998 Simon Birch. Irving insisted that the title and character names be changed because the screenplay was "markedly different" from the novel. He is on record, however, as having enjoyed the film. Other works In addition to his novels, he has also published nonfiction: The Imaginary Girlfriend (1995), a short memoir focusing on writing and wrestling; Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (1996), a collection of his writings, which includes a brief memoir and short stories; and My Movie Business (1999), an account of the protracted process of bringing The Cider House Rules to the big screen, In 2004 he published a children's picture book, A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound, illustrated by Tatjana Hauptmann.

It had originally been included in his 1998 novel A Widow for One Year. Life Since the publication of Garp, which made him independently wealthy, Irving has been able to concentrate solely on fiction writing as a vocation, sporadically accepting short-term teaching positions —including one at his alma mater, the Iowa Writers' Workshop—and serving as an assistant coach on his sons' high school wrestling teams. (Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in 1992 as an "Outstanding American.") Irving's four most highly regarded novels—The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and the 1998 A Widow for One Year—have been published in Modern Library editions. In 2004, a portion of A Widow for One Year was adapted into The Door in the Floor, starring Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger.

On June 28, 2005, the New York Times published an article revealing that Until I Find You (2005) contains two elements about his personal life that he had never before discussed publicly: his sexual abuse at age 11 by an older woman, and the recent entrance in his life of his biological father's family.

Works 1968 - Setting Free the Bears 1972 - The Water-Method Man 1978 - The World According to Garp 1981 - The Hotel New Hampshire 1985 - The Cider House Rules 1989 - A Prayer for Owen Meany 1994 - A Son of the Circus 1995 - The Imaginary Girlfriend (non-fiction) 1996 - Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (collection) 1998 - A Widow for One Year 1999 - My Movie Business (non-fiction) 1999 - The Cider House Rules: A Screenplay 2001 - The Fourth Hand 2004 - A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound (Children's book) 2005 - Until I Find You 2009 - Last Night in Twisted River 2012 - In One Person The Cider House Rules by John Irving - Read Online About Reviews From the Publisher First published in 1985 by William Morrow, The Cider House Rules is John Irving's sixth novel.

Set in rural Maine in the first half of the twentieth century, it tells the story of Dr. Wilbur Larch—saint and obstetrician, founder and director of the orphanage in the town of St. Cloud's, ether addict and abortionist. It is also the story of Dr. Larch's favorite orphan, Homer Wells, who is never adopted.

Topics: Maine, Macabre, Abortions, Doctors, Love Triangle, Adoption, Pregnancy, Ethics, Made into a Movie, Family, Friendship, Morality, Social Class, Friends to Lovers, Childhood, Realism, 20th Century, Male Author, American Author, Contemplative, 1950s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, Epic, Dramatic, and Tragic Published: HarperCollins on Jul 31, 2012 ISBN: 9780062235183 The Cider House Rules (Hardcover) | Rainy Day Books Home » The Cider House Rules (Hardcover) The Cider House Rules (Hardcover) Out of Stock, generally 2-3 days to Order your Copy Description First published in 1985, The Cider House Rules is John Irving's sixth novel. Set in rural Maine in the first half of this century, it tells the story of Dr. Wilbur Larch--saint and obstetrician, founder and director of the orphanage in the town of St. Cloud's, ether addict and abortionist.

It is also the story of Dr. Larch's favorite orphan, Homer Wells, who is never adopted. About the Author JOHN IRVING was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942. His first novel, Setting Free the Bears, was published in 1968, when he was twenty-six. He competed as a wrestler for twenty years, and coached wrestling until he was forty-seven. Mr. Irving has been nominated for a National Book Award three times--winning once, in 1980, for his novel The World According to Garp. He received an O. Henry Award in 1981 for his short story "Interior Space." In 2000, Mr. Irving won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules. In 2013, he won a Lambda Literary Award for his novel In One Person. An international writer--his novels have been translated into more than thirty-five languages--John Irving lives in Toronto. His all-time best-selling novel, in every language, is A Prayer for Owen Meany. Avenue of Mysteries is his fourteenth novel. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Praise For… "Superb in scope and originality, a novel as good as one could hope to find from any author, anywhere, anytime. Engrossing, moving, thoroughly satisfying." --Joseph Heller The Cider House Rules | IndieBound A Community of Independent Local Bookstores The Cider House Rules Modern Library, Hardcover, 9780679603351, 592pp. Publication Date: October 26, 1999 List Price: $24.95* * Individual store prices may vary. Buy at Local Store Enter your zip code below to purchase from an indie close to you. or Buy Here Description First published in 1985, The Cider House Rules is John Irving's sixth novel. Set in rural Maine in the first half of this century, it tells the story of Dr. Wilbur Larch--saint and obstetrician, founder and director of the orphanage in the town of St. Cloud's, ether addict and abortionist. It is also the story of Dr. Larch's favorite orphan, Homer Wells, who is never adopted.

About the Author JOHN IRVING was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942. His first novel, Setting Free the Bears, was published in 1968, when he was twenty-six. He competed as a wrestler for twenty years, and coached wrestling until he was forty-seven. Mr. Irving has been nominated for a National Book Award three times--winning once, in 1980, for his novel The World According to Garp. He received an O. Henry Award in 1981 for his short story "Interior Space." In 2000, Mr. Irving won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules. In 2013, he won a Lambda Literary Award for his novel In One Person. An international writer--his novels have been translated into more than thirty-five languages--John Irving lives in Toronto. His all-time best-selling novel, in every language, is A Prayer for Owen Meany. Avenue of Mysteries is his fourteenth novel. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Praise For The Cider House Rules… "Superb in scope and originality, a novel as good as one could hope to find from any author, anywhere, anytime. Engrossing, moving, thoroughly satisfying." --Joseph Heller NYTimes May 26, 1985, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 1, Column 2; Book Review Desk Byline: By Benjamin DeMott; Benjamin DeMott teaches at Amherst College and is chairman of the National Humanities Faculty board of trustees. Lead: THE CIDER HOUSE RULES. By John Irving. 560 pp. New York: William Morrow & Company. $18.95. BY turns witty, tenderhearted, fervent and scarifying, ''The Cider House Rules'' is, for me, John Irving's first truly valuable book. The storytelling is straightforward - not the case with his huge commercial success, ''The World According to Garp'' (1978). The theme is in firm focus - not the case with ''The Hotel New Hampshire'' (1981). The novelist's often-deplored weakness for the cute and trendy, although still evident, is here less troubling.

Far more important, ''The Cider House Rules'' has a public dimension - could, indeed, play a significantly assuasive role in an American social conflict that is now dangerously exacerbated. The book is, to be sure, a novel (the author's sixth), not a tract; it follows several human lives from youth to maturity, gripping our attention as chronicle rather than argument. Text: But it is also a book about abortion, and the knowledge and sympathy directing Mr. Irving's exploration of the issue are exceptional. Pertinent history, the specifics of surgical procedure, the irrecusable sorrow of guilt and humiliation, the needs and rights of children - their weight is palpable in these pages. Responsive to the ideals and passions that drive both parties - pro-life, pro-choice - the author does not tease himself with delusions that a sunny negotiated accord waits just down the road. There is no maddeningly abstract prattle about the possibility of determining, ''scientifically,'' the precise moment at which ''the fetus becomes human.'' But Mr. Irving draws readers close, in the space of his imagination, to an understanding of essential links, commonalities - even unities - between factions now seething with hatred for each other.

I have to record, at the risk of a pompous sound, that the novel's potential political consequence -as an approach to reconciliation based on clarification of shared moral objectives - moved me to gratitude as I read. The time frame extends from the first through the sixth decades of the 20th century (we stop well short of the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion). There are two heroes: the book's first half is dominated by Dr. Wilbur Larch, a celibate physician who directs an orphanage, delivers babies and performs abortions illegally (''when he was asked and when it was safe''). The second half belongs to the orphaned, ''unadoptable'' Homer Wells, whom Larch loves as a spiritual son and schools informally as a gynecological surgeon. The setting is Maine, or rather the two Maines, dark and light. Larch's orphanage, St. Cloud's, is located in a dank, stripped, far northern river town founded as a logging camp and plunged into decline when a paper company moves downstream.

Wells spends his 20's and 30's on a seaside farm where Atlantic breezes clean the air and apple and lobster harvests alike confirm the rightness of hope. W ARS, elections, public personages obtrude intermittently. It is in letters to F.D.R., for instance, that Larch presses his full argument for the legalization of abortion. (''Mr. Roosevelt - you, of all people! - you should know that the unborn are not as wretched or as in need of our assistance as the born! Please take pity on the born!'') There is wry scrutiny of several cultural innovations relevant to the book's subject, including drive-in theaters. There are striking successes in evoking, unsentimentally, the imaginative lives of the poor. (Especially admirable is an easygoing description of migrant workers entertaining themselves on the roof of the cider press that gives the book its title, observing the magical lights of a distant county fair and explaining their meaning to one another.) And there are a half-dozen or more love stories.

(The two most affecting portray the unrequited passion of a pugnacious, winningly lewd orphan named Melony for Homer Wells, and the unrequited but doomed passion - years later - of Homer Wells's son for a black woman sexually abused by her father.) But the novel's core is the developing conflict between Larch and Wells, spiritual father and son, concerning the unlawful termination of pregnancies. Through a series of complicated schemes - Mr. Irving, the inventive, clever-zany wit is in clear sight here -Larch not only trains the orphaned lad as surgeon, but arranges an alternative identity for him as a licensed physician. Pushed further by the need to allay suspicion among the clinic-orphanage's trustees, he fabricates a record of antiabortion statements for the younger man. The goal is to insure that, after Larch is gone, help will still be available to poor women facing unwanted pregnancies. But it emerges that the cliche-ridden pro-life statements sardonically fabricated for Wells are not at total variance with his views. Repelled by the surgical procedures of abortion, persuaded that ''the fetus has a soul,'' Wells pulls back from the place prepared for him, and a contest of wills ensues.

A key scene dramatizing that contest - Wells's first expression of disapproval, Larch's first self-defense - takes place in Larch's clinic. He is performing an abortion with Wells as anesthetist; in the next room a nurse checks the contractions of an unwed mother; we have just heard, outside, the voices of orphanage children pleading for a chance to prove their qualities -''I'm the best! I'm the best!'' - to a couple newly arrived, theoretically in search of an ''adoptable.'' Wells, whose attachment to Larch is deep, takes a stand -says aloud that he wishes to leave the operating room. Continuing to scrape with the curette, Larch insists Wells must watch, must understand the process, must learn to perform it. Wells protests, Larch is obdurate. Anguish and suppressed rage intensify, and Larch finally cries out: ''Do I interfere? . . . When absolutely helpless women tell me that they simply can't have an abortion, that they simply must go on through with having another - and yet another - orphan: do I interfere? Do I? I do not,'' [Larch] said scraping. ''I deliver it. . . .

And do you think there are largely happy histories for the babies born here? . . . But do I resist? I do not. I do not even recommend. I give them what they want: an orphan or an abortion.'' I am neutral: this is the claim. I am a teaching professional, I serve my patients' will. Larch's self-justifications have force and reason, but, as we listen, we understand that the man's whole response to his work is not in his speech. And before the story is done we understand that its mission is to show us what is absent by revealing the full moral and psychological reality experienced by an altruist as abortionist. What is absent, speaking bluntly, is suffering and guilt - Larch's suffering and guilt. He began his career confidently but soon found himself fighting his abhorrence of his own surgical procedures. The words he addresses, late in the book, to Wells speak to his own history: ''If abortion was legal, a woman would have a choice - and so would you. You could feel free not to do it because someone else would. But the way it is, you're trapped. Women are trapped.

Women are victims, and so are you.'' How exactly has Larch been victimized? During his medical training he saw the fearful self-mutilation practiced by poor pregnant women. As orphanage director he observed firsthand the pathos of the lives and longings of children born unwanted and quickly abandoned. More than once in his career he dealt with class hypocrisy - the comfortable assumption that, for the Truly Nice, double standards are invariably appropriate. All that would bring a sensitive physician to a guiltlessness while breaking laws against abortion was, seemingly, part of Larch's experience. And yet he cannot feel guiltless, cannot endure his work, sees himself as trapped: here lies his victimization. The procedures of dilation and curettage, the sight of ''the products of conception'' - limbs, organs, nascent features of expression - are, without anodyne, as unbearable to him as to Wells. The assurance his crustiness projects edges ever toward hysteria; he is addicted to ether; his altruism has, as its reverse side, a near incapacity to express feeling for others. Implicit in Larch's suffering is, I believe, Mr.

Irving's strong, simple theme: our learned forbearance and cultivated sensitivity lie at the root both of acceptance of abortion and repugnance for it. The orphanage at St. Cloud's was founded long before the creation of aid-to-dependent-children programs, in a century during which moving crusades were launched to awaken public consciousness: obliviousness is cruelty, and forbearance creates obligations to the neighbors' children, not merely to one's own. Subtly, shrewdly, Mr. Irving evokes those crusades. The bedtime stories Larch reads aloud to the children in their dormitory are drawn from the novelists - Dickens and Charlotte Bronte - who taught their contemporaries to notice the waifs in their midst, to hesitate to scorn or cuff or starve or sell them into slavery as child miners or sweeps. Considered in this context, Larch's kindly orphanage can be understood as a stage in the history of compassion. The same is true for the emergence, later on, of the initially confident altruist-abortionist. And it is also true for the development of that figure, still later, into a person conscious of his guilt, suffering and victimization.

What is felt in the grain of ''The Cider House Rules'' - in its study of rule-givers and rule-breakers - is that the history of compassion cannot have a stop and must perpetually demand larger generosities than those hitherto conceived. By responding to that demand we may, tomorrow, invent ways to abolish nightmare choices between born and unborn. Something akin to this faith seems alive, finally, in Larch's successor, Homer Wells, at the close of the novel; in the process of deciding that he must perform abortions, he reaches a position on the ''issue'' more humane than any summoned by standard pro-life, pro-choice campaign cries. V IEWED in literary terms, ''The Cider House Rules'' is hardly without defect. Its young hero and several lesser characters lack presence and independent vitality. The accounts of diseases, treatments and operations are impressively detailed - Mr. Irving acknowledges debts to his grandfather, an obstetrician and author of technical manuals, and to Dr. Richard Selzer, a surgeon and essayist - but improbabilities abound in the narrative. And there are other difficulties, none negligible. Often the tone wavers; the graphic mode gives way to ghoulishness or bawdy.

And surely no other writer of literary reputation is as absurdly certain as Mr. Irving that the repetition of the words ''tears'' and ''kisses'' unfailingly summons emotion. No one aware of the present literary climate, however, blames failures to sustain poised thematic seriousness solely on individual novelists. It is one thing to counsel an author choosing Mr. Irving's themes to aim for the nobility, solemnity and heartbreakingly perfect restraint of, say, a masterwork like Rodin's ''Mother With a Dying Child.'' It is another to explain how these qualities are to be achieved in an age ill at ease with the notion that art can have a subject, an age half-persuaded, in fact, that no subjects exist except language, the death of feeling or the artist's proud (or nervous) separation from society. For whole chapters at a time ''The Cider House Rules'' manages, despite the odds, to speak as though the tragedy of a country blinding itself to the history of its own moral progress mattered, and as though a writer's work has to do not with exterminating pity and anger but with animating them.

At its best, this novel is an example, now rare, of the courage of imaginative ardor. COSTLY PLEASURES John Irving did not intend ''The Cider House Rules'' to be a polemic; he had hoped to write a lustrous, 19th-century novel with the emotional and atmospheric underpinnings of ''Jane Eyre'' or ''David Copperfield.'' ''I wanted to write an orphan novel,'' he said recently in his Manhattan apartment. ''It was a year before abortion even entered the story. But it made perfect sense. In the early part of the century, what doctor would be most sympathetic to performing abortions but the doctor who delivered unwanted babies, then cared for them in an orphanage?'' Long an advocate of freedom of choice, Mr. Irving said he had no idea when he began that the novel would develop into such an intense argument about abortion and that it would be published at a time so full of tension over the issue. ''A novelist is like a horse with blinders on,'' he said. ''But I'd really be wearing a false coat if I pretended that the real reason abortion is such an issue in this novel is that it makes a better story.

I was quite happy to be able to use it.'' Still, he was eager to abide by his original concept of a novel that was Victorian in texture, so he carefully structured the medical and farming details. On his bookshelf sits ''Gray's Anatomy,'' alongside ''The Rabbit's Anatomy'': ''When I did research at the Yale Medical School,'' he said, ''I was told it would be easier to study an animal's anatomy before getting into humans.'' Although Mr. Irving says the new novel is a departure for him in the way it ''sets atmosphere, and creates a landscape,'' a friend pointed out a thread that connects it to his other books. ''It seems in all my books, every act of sexual pleasure is extremely costly. It is part of the New England notion that for every pleasure taken, you must make amends. I certainly don't think I mean that,'' he said, sounding almost horrified at the thought. ''Frankly, it sounds rather austere to me.'' - Esther B.

Fein John Irving, author of The Cider House Rules: 'My novels are horror stories' John Irving, author of The Cider House Rules: 'My novels are horror stories' John Irving's latest novel is Avenue of Mysteries Credit: Blake Fitch Tim Auld 5 February 2016 • 7:00am In John Irving’s 2001 novel The Fourth Hand, a journalist strays too close to a lion’s cage and has his hand bitten off. Lions loom large and savage again in the author’s latest work, Avenue of Mysteries, and there is something distinctly leonine about the 73-year-old as he walks into the boardroom at his publisher’s office in London. His hair is swept back from his brows in two waves of white, parted down the centre, and his handsome features are etched with wrinkles. He is not tall, but is sturdily built, a reminder of his years as a competitive wrestler – you get the feeling that he would still back himself to take you down if it came to a fight. He is also, like his novels, talkative, funny, at times angry, and a little bit enigmatic.

He speaks – his New England accent a soft growl – in winding paragraphs, digressing, pausing, but always weaving his way back to where he started. John Irving: 'In One Person isn’t about my having a gay son. I was making notes on this novel before I knew Everett was gay' He may have, in his own words, started out as an “underdog”, whose dyslexia meant it took him twice as long to read anything as his classmates, but he is now, without doubt, the alpha male. Since his breakthrough in 1978 with The World According to Garp, he has earned himself, and his publishers, millions. He has written 14 novels, been translated into more than 35 languages and had bestsellers all over the world. In 2000, his adaptation of his novel The Cider House Rules won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay. He has his critics. In 2000, Tom Wolfe berated Irving, along with John Updike and Norman Mailer, for failing in ambition to “go out into the world… [and turning] inward to such subject matter as their own little crevice”. His popular appeal has also raised literary eyebrows.

Irving remains unabashed. “I’ve read about myself that I am not to be taken seriously because I am a shameless entertainer, a crowd pleaser,” he has said. “You bet, I am.” John Irving: 'You bet, I'm an entertainer' Credit: Kimmo Mäntylä/REX/Shutterstock Julian Barnes has spoken of Irving’s “great traditional strengths of narrative and character” and he does, indeed, hark back to the great storytellers of the 19th century – Dickens the showman, Melville, Trollope, Hardy and Tolstoy. “I always felt old-fashioned in the kind of writer I wanted to be,” he says. Like Dickens, he writes with 20:20 vision about children and the rites of growing up; about families; about unlikely heroes, misfits and ideologues. He can be polemical when he chooses: A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989) is a trenchant critique of both the Vietnam War and Reagan’s time as president; The Cider House Rules (1985) is a plea for abortion not to be driven underground.

He does not shy away from edgy storylines: an incestuous relationship is one of the most compelling in The Hotel New Hampshire (1981). And death lurks always just around the corner, particularly, and most chillingly, the death of children. It was becoming a father that gave me the subject that occurs and reoccurs in so many of the novels: the thought or fear of something happening to a child What is it with all the dead children? “It was becoming a father [aged 22] that gave me the subject that occurs and reoccurs in so many of the novels: the thought or fear of something happening to a child. I don’t think any single thing has been as formative to my writing.” (He has three adult sons, all hale and hearty.) Fear of the death of children stalks the pages of Avenue of Mysteries, which tells the story of Juan Diego, a Mexican-born writer who has lived his adult life in Iowa, making a sentimental journey to the Philippines on behalf of a dead friend.

Falling asleep on the journey, he dreams of his childhood living with his younger sister, Lupe (a mind reader), as “dump kids” among the rubbish heaps on the outskirts of Mexico City. When their mother dies (they don’t know who their father is), they go to work for a circus where children perform on high-wires without a safety net. There are sub-plots about a Vietnam War draft dodger and two spectral female book fans, Dorothy and Miriam, who befriend Juan Diego as an adult and hop in and out of bed with him like a sexual tag-wrestling team. The book has not been universally praised, with one critic lamenting: “Evidence abounds that Irving is asleep at the wheel.” That wasn’t my experience. It’s a curious, at times wilfully opaque, story, full of digressions. But Irving’s powers of storytelling – when to give knowledge and when to withhold it, then smack you in the face with it – remain intact. Other reviewers have been lukewarm about the magical-realist touches, but Irving’s writing, with its fantastical flourishes and fateful coincidences, has always been a mere notch away from magical realism.

Irving huffs and puffs a bit about the term “magical realism”. “It seems to me my novels are more horror stories. Well, not like Stephen King, maybe, but I certainly feel I have more in common with Stephen King than I have with a lot of other contemporary novelists. We are both following Melville’s dictum, 'Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal’, and there is no greater horror story for me than the idea of a child at risk.” One group of people whom the book will certainly not please is the Catholic church. Juan Diego is vituperative about the church’s attitudes to abortion, Aids and gay/bi/transgender partnerships. There is one scene in the book, played for laughs, where Dorothy performs oral sex on Juan Diego while he is describing the miraculous appearance of the Virgin Mary. It’s the kind of thing that got Salman Rushdie into real trouble. “Well,” says Irving, who has and has not been an observant Congregationalist Christian at different times in his life, “funny is what people who take their religion without perspective object to most. Don’t forget that in Salman’s case, he told a joke.

It was a joke that got him into trouble. You’re not supposed to be funny about certain things.” John Irving Credit: Rex Features Yes, he says, he has issues with the Catholic church: “Look at how Italy is, just become out of step with the rest of Europe on gay marriage. Of course, it has to do with the influence of the Catholic church. Look at the countries in the world where women are still dying of botched abortions because safe and legal access to that choice to have an abortion is simply not available.” But no, he insists, the book is not an attack on the Catholic faith itself: “I don’t call myself a believer or not a believer, but make no mistake, this novel would fail, this story would be no good if Juan Diego and Lupe are atheists. It isn’t the institution of the church, it isn’t the man-made policies of a church that bring you there and keep you going back there, it is something to do with the miraculous, which is what you believed in the first place.” There’s always been something a little scary to me about those people you meet who’ve read your work, not only closely, but incessantly What are we to make of Dorothy and Miriam?

I remind him that he once said that “promiscuous sex is invariably punished in my novels”. He laughs. “Well, I think that depends on what you feel about faith and spirits. Are they demons in human form? I think I also liked the idea that, because Juan Diego is a writer, I could make these two his fans, who can actually recite whole passages of his novels as well as he thinks only he can. Perhaps there’s always been something a little scary to me about those people you meet who’ve read your work, not only closely, but incessantly. When you meet someone like that, it’s always a little daunting. I think, 'Hey, maybe you should just lighten up and read something else.’” The other kind of reader of whom Irving is wary is the one who tries to forge biographical links between characters and events in his fiction and his life. The bare bones of this life are known. He grew up an only child in Exeter, New Hampshire, with his mother and stepfather (he never met his father). He liked wrestling and reading, and went on to study at Pittsburgh, New Hampshire, Vienna and Iowa.

He married and had two sons, divorced in 1981, then married again, in 1987, his publisher, and now agent, Janet Turnbull, with whom he has a son. John Irving at home Credit: Rex Features Uncharacteristically, he spoke out publicly a decade ago about two issues central to his then new novel Until I Find You; he said that he had been sexually abused at the age of 11 by a woman significantly older than him, and also that he had spent his life wanting to find out who his true father was. Contrary to everything he had said in the past, yes, it was a source of pain. But it’s rare for him to show his head over the parapet like this. Today, he says he hates what he calls the “Hemingway 'write what you know’ school, which is just about the dullest and least inspiring advice. Frankly my own life has largely bored me,” he says triumphantly. He sells himself rather short: his life could make an extremely good autobiographical novel; he is just not interested in writing it.

A reader of Irving’s works will easily spot themes to which he returns again and again (bears, abortion, an attraction to an older woman, wrestling, absent fathers, men who escaped the Vietnam War draft, dead dogs). It’s all the clutter of his own life (even the bear: he once looked after one at a circus in Vienna), but transformed, kaleidoscope-like, each time into something new. Irving described Wolfe’s writing as “journalistic hyperbole”; Wolfe joked that Irving’s latest novel was “about some neurotic people in the Hamptons. They never get to town.” He is also not a great one for grandiose statements about what literature should be, which is how his spat with Tom Wolfe in 2010 came about. What may have started as a disagreement about whether or not there is such a thing as the great American novel quickly turned into mud-slinging. Irving described Wolfe’s writing as “journalistic hyperbole”; Wolfe joked that Irving’s latest novel was “about some neurotic people in the Hamptons.

They never get to town.” “It speaks well of your country that you don’t talk about what the great British novel is,” says Irving after some frustrated huffing and puffing. “I have never been interested in being a great American writer. I just wanted to be a good writer. I have an interest in world literature and my interest in being a writer came from the world. The whole business of being an American, or where I see myself in the panoply of American fiction or American literature, has never concerned me.” And with that, the former wrestler and citizen of the world from New England, heads off, all 73-years-young of him, to work out in the gym. Avenue of Mysteries is published by Doubleday (£20).

To order a copy from the Telegraph for £16.99 plus £1.99 p&p, call 0844 871 1515 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk Follow Telegraph Books Find Books - Irving - Cider House Rules - Library Research Guides at Cerritos College V – NAVAL SCIENCE Z – BIBLIOGRAPHY, LIBRARY SCIENCE & INFORMATION RESOURCES These twenty-one broad subject areas are further divided into more specific subject areas by adding one or two additional letters as well as some numbers. For a more detailed breakdown of any subject, go to the Library of Congress web page . So, How Do I Find a Book on the Shelf? Try this exercise , which was put together by the librarians at Lewis-Clark State University, to see if you have figured out the Library of Congress system! Finding Books on Your Topic Once you have chosen a topic and done your background research you will be ready to conduct more comprehensive research using books. Use the Library Catalog available on the Cerritos College Library Home Page to find books available in the Library. Books can provide a broad overview of a topic or in-depth information.

You can search for books by author, title, subject, or keyword. Listed below are some Library of Congress Subject Headings used in the catalog for books relating to John Irving and his work, The Cider House Rules. Use these terms to search by Subject. Remember, this list is by no means conclusive. American literature Book Review: The Cider House Rules by John Irving | Booked Solid Book Review: The Cider House Rules by John Irving Posted on May 18, 2013 by victor.kralisz Who’s Rules? It’s hard to believe that when Morrow published John Irving’s Cider House Rules in 1985 he was just at the beginning of his prolific and critically acclaimed career with only Garp and Hotel New Hampshire preceding, other lesser-known academic works notwithstanding. The New York Times Book Review’s major critic treated it carefully but finally admitted it was an achievement and more mature and accessible than his previous work. It’s both comforting and comfortable therefore to look back over a quarter century with so many later novels in the can and with this one in the spotlight.

The novel follows Wilbur Larch, obstetrician and orphanage director, over the course of his very long life, with the main emphasis on the forty-some years he shares with his favorite and finally unadoptable orphan Homer Wells from the 1920’s to the 1950’s. Homer evolves into Larch’s apprentice, spending years with Gray’s Anatomy and real-life midwifery until there is little difference in training between Dr. and pupil. The father/son theme runs wide in this novel but has its genesis in Larch’s childlessness among many hundreds of orphans and Homer’s fatherlessness with Larch as father figure extraordinaire. The orphanage at St. Cloud’s has a deep secret that gives Larch his impetus to train a successor: it is the only place in a wide swath of rural Maine that a woman can receive a safe and professional abortion. Among the many births that keep the orphanage full and Larch and Homer busy in delivery, there is the other work of rescue that Larch pursues and Homer eventually rejects.

The polemical possibilities of the pro-life and pro-choice debate are not missed in the long case of Larch and Homer, but it’s important to see this debate in the context of the time, and to see how Irving widens his lens on so much else in the moral universe. Homer of course must leave and as a twenty-something man falls accidentally into the wide circle of the Worthington apple enterprise on the coast of Maine. There he falls madly in love with Candy Kendall, fiancée of Wally Worthington, apple heir and all-around most handsome and good natured fellow in Maine. There he also finds his self-perceived vocation as apple farmer: At St. Cloud’s (orphanage) growth was unwanted even when it was delivered — and the process of birth was often interrupted. Now he was engaged in the process of growing things. What he loved about the life at Ocean View (Orchard) was how everything was of use and that everything was wanted. (p. 237) Irving, John, 1942-. The cider house rules : a novel. New York : Morrow, c1985.

Question: Which American author wrote the 1985 book The Cider House Rules?
Answer: John IRVING