The World According to Garp
John Irving's The World According to Garp, published in 1978 and a National Book Award winner, is one of the great American novels of the late twentieth century and the book that turned Irving into a household name. Garp is the unlikely son of Jenny Fields, a fiercely independent New England nurse who decides during World War II that she wants a child without bothering to want a husband. The man she chooses, a brain-damaged ball turret gunner with a single repeated word in his vocabulary, gives Garp his last name and dies almost immediately afterward. Garp grows up in the dormitories of a New England boarding school, becomes a wrestler, and follows his mother to Vienna, where they both begin to write. From there the novel carries Garp through marriage, fatherhood, literary fame, and the long slow argument between his life and the lives that women around him are trying to build, all set against a country in which sexual violence and the politics of the body are inescapably present. Irving writes with comedy, tenderness, and a tragic sense of how arbitrary catastrophe can be. Garp is funny, devastating, generous, and unmistakably itself.
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The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
In a Boston military hospital in 1942, nurse Jenny Fields climbs onto a brain-injured ball turret gunner to get herself a child. Her son T. S.
The World According to Garp was written by John Irving and published in 1978. It was Irving's fourth novel and his first major commercial success. The metadata above lists Eugenides in error.
Yes. George Roy Hill directed a 1982 film adaptation starring Robin Williams as T.S. Garp. The film was nominated for Academy Awards including Best Supporting Actress for Glenn Close.
The World According to Garp is a standalone novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, not part of a series.
The World According to Garp is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.