Donald Barthelme

Barthelme grew up in Houston, the son of a modernist architect whose Bauhaus-influenced house was the strangest one on the block, and studied philosophy and journalism there before an army stint in Korea, arriving the day the armistice was signed. He ran a Houston contemporary art museum and edited its journal before moving to New York in 1962 to write for The New Yorker, which would publish well over a hundred of his stories.

His stories fractured narrative into collage: fairy tales retold with corporate jargon, dialogues without attribution, lists that swerved into pathos, footnoted parodies of academic prose: a style so widely imitated that 'Barthelmesque' entered the critical vocabulary within his own lifetime. Snow White and The Dead Father extended the same techniques to novel length, but the short story remained his true instrument.

He taught for years at the University of Houston, helping found its creative writing program, and died there of throat cancer in 1989, not long after Sixty Stories had confirmed him as the form's reigning innovator.