1933–1982 · American novelist and creative-writing teacher
John Gardner was born on 21 July 1933 in Batavia, New York, and died on 14 September 1982 in a motorcycle accident in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania. He is best known for Grendel, which retells Beowulf from the monster’s point of view, and for October Light, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He was a lifelong teacher of fiction writing: at Oberlin, at Chico State — where Raymond Carver was among his students — and at San Francisco State, Bennington, Binghamton and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His two craft books, On Becoming a Novelist and The Art of Fiction, appeared after his death and became fixtures of American writing classrooms, which is very likely how a line from his workshop hardened into an adage.