John Winslow Irving: Novelist, Screenwriter, and Storyteller of Garden Grace

March 2, 1942

Dearest reader,

On this day, John Winslow Irving (books by this person)was born, an American-Canadian novelist and screenwriter renowned for his richly crafted characters and intricate storytelling.

With best-sellers such as The World According to Garp (1978), The Cider House Rules (1985), A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), and A Widow for One Year (1998), Irving’s literary reach spans decades.

Here is a charming excerpt from A Prayer for Owen Meany:

And if she wore cocktail dresses when she labored in her rose garden, they were cocktail dresses that she no longer intended to wear to cocktail parties.

Even in her rose garden, she did not want to be seen underdressed.

If the dresses got too dirty from gardening, she threw them out.

When my mother suggested to her that she might have them cleaned, my grandmother said,

‘What?

And have those people at the cleaners wonder what I was doing in a dress to make it that dirty?’

From my grandmother I learned that logic is relative.

John Irving’s prose reminds us that gardens, like stories, are places of transformation, where logic bends and unexpected beauty unfurls, often in the most familiar of settings.