Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| Setting Free the Bears | 1968 |
| The Water-Method Man | 1972 |
| The 158-Pound Marriage | 1974 |
| The World According to Garp | 1978 |
| The Hotel New Hampshire | 1981 |
| The Cider House Rules | 1985 |
| A Prayer for Owen Meany | 1989 |
| A Son of the Circus | 1994 |
| A Widow for One Year | 1998 |
| The Fourth Hand | 2001 |
| Until I Find You | 2005 |
| Last Night in Twisted River | 2009 |
| In One Person | 2012 |
| Avenue of Mysteries | 2015 |
| The Last Chairlift | 2022 |
| Queen Esther | 2025 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| Trying to Save Piggy Sneed | 1993 |
Publication Order of Children’s Books
| A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound | 2004 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| The Imaginary Girlfriend | 1996 |
| My Movie Business | 1999 |
About John Irving
John Irving (born 1942) is an American and Canadian novelist and screenwriter, best known for “The World According to Garp”, “The Cider House Rules” and “A Prayer for Owen Meany”. He has written sixteen novels, and he won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2000 for the film of “The Cider House Rules”.
He was born John Wallace Blunt Jr. in Exeter, New Hampshire, on 2 March 1942, and was raised by his mother and his stepfather, Colin Irving, who taught at Phillips Exeter Academy. Irving wrestled at Exeter as a student and later worked there as an assistant coach, and wrestling runs through his books. He has dyslexia. In the late 1960s he studied under Kurt Vonnegut at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
His first novel, “Setting Free the Bears”, was published in 1968, when he was 26. It and the two that followed were reasonably well reviewed but did not find a large readership. His fourth, “The World According to Garp” (1978), became an international bestseller, and its paperback edition won a National Book Award in 1980. George Roy Hill filmed it in 1982 with Robin Williams as Garp and Glenn Close as his mother.
The books that followed were bestsellers. “The Hotel New Hampshire” (1981) was filmed in 1984. “The Cider House Rules” (1985) is set in a Maine orphanage and has abortion as its central subject. “A Prayer for Owen Meany” (1989), set in a New England boarding school and in Toronto, deals with religion and the Vietnam War, and was the partial basis for the film “Simon Birch” (1998). Many of his novels are set in and around New England, often in fictional towns resembling Exeter.
Irving spent nearly ten years developing his screenplay of “The Cider House Rules”, which Lasse Hallstrom directed in 1999, and he wrote about the experience in the memoir “My Movie Business”. “A Widow for One Year” (1998) was partly adapted as the film “The Door in the Floor” (2004). “In One Person” (2012) won a Lambda Literary Award. His most recent novels are “The Last Chairlift” (2022) and “Queen Esther” (2025). He became a Canadian citizen in 2019 and lives in Toronto.
Photo: Elke Wetzig (Elya), CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).