“Then another one of my friends reminded me that, in Sunday School, we used to lift up this little boy he was our age, about eight or nine, but he was so tiny that we could pass him back and forth over our heads.” “Suddenly one of my friends mentioned a name that drew a blank with me-a Russell somebody,” Irving wrote.
The author was home in Exeter, New Hampshire, for Christmas in the early ‘80s, where he and his childhood friends were discussing other friends who had gone to Vietnam and never come back, or who had come back but were messed up from the experience. John Irving based Owen Meany on a childhood friend. “What makes the first sentence of A Prayer for Owen Meany such a good one is that the whole novel is contained in it.” 2.
“I may one day write a better first sentence to a novel than that of A Prayer for Owen Meany, but I doubt it," Irving wrote. In the case of Owen Meany, Irving didn't write the first sentence (“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice-not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God I am a Christian because of Owen Meany”) until at least a year later. “If I haven’t already written the ending-and I mean more than a rough draft-I can’t write the first sentence.” “I never write the first sentence until I know all the important things that happen in the story, especially-and I mean exactly-what happens at the end of the novel,” he wrote after the book was published. Irving always writes the ends of his novels first, and Owen Meany was no different: He wrote the penultimate paragraph of the novel first, and added the last paragraph two days later. The first sentence of A Prayer for Owen Meany is John Irving’s favorite. Here are a few things you might not have known about it. Urn:oclc:761970051 Republisher_date 20120602100251 Republisher_operator Scandate 20120601055624 Scanner John Irving’s novel about a boy with a “wrecked voice” who believes he’s an instrument of God is a staple on high school summer reading lists. Urn:lcp:prayerforowenmea00irvi_0:epub:f4382173-3cfd-4fa0-a33d-6a83aadd5639 Extramarc University of Toronto Foldoutcount 0 Identifier prayerforowenmea00irvi_0 Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t0dv2ph0w Isbn 9780886192266Ġ886192269 Ocr ABBYY FineReader 8.0 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.11 Ocr_module_version 0.0.14 Openlibrary OL14779413M Openlibrary_edition Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 21:11:19 Asin 0886192269 Boxid IA180001 Boxid_2 CH130318 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City Toronto Donorįriendsofthesanfranciscopubliclibrary External-identifier
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