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Frederick Buechner

Carl Frederick Buechner (/ˈbiːknər/ BEEK-nər; July 11, 1926 – August 15, 2022) was an American writer, novelist, poet, autobiographer, essayist, preacher, and theologian. He was an ordained Presbyterian minister and the author of thirty-nine published books.His work encompassed different genres, including fiction, autobiography, essays and sermons, and his career spanned more than six decades. Buechner's books were translated into many languages for publication around the world. He was best known for his novels, including A Long Day's Dying, The Book of Bebb, Godric (a finalist for the 1981 Pulitzer Prize), and Brendan, his memoirs, including Telling Secrets and The Sacred Journey, and his more theological works, including Secrets in the Dark, The Magnificent Defeat, and Telling the Truth.

Buechner was called a "major talent" and "a very good writer indeed" by The New York Times, and "one of our most original storytellers" by USA Today. Annie Dillard (Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek) called him "one of our finest writers." Buechner was also a finalist for the National Book Award, presented by the National Book Foundation and the Pulitzer Prize, and has been awarded eight honorary degrees from such institutions as Yale University and the Virginia Theological Seminary.[6] In addition, Buechner was the recipient of the O. Henry Award, the Rosenthal Award, the Christianity and Literature Belles Lettres Prize, and was recognized by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Carl Frederick Buechner, the eldest son of Katherine Golay (Kuhn) and Carl Frederick Buechner Sr., was born on July 11, 1926, in New York City. During Buechner's early childhood the family moved frequently, as Buechner's father searched for work. In The Sacred Journey, Buechner recalls that "Virtually every year of my life until I was fourteen, I lived in a different place, had different people to take care of me, went to a different school. The only house that remained constant was the one where my maternal grandparents lived in a suburb of Pittsburgh called East Liberty ... Apart from that one house on Woodland Road, home was not a place to me when I was a child. It was people." This changed in 1936, when Buechner's father committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning, a result of his conviction that he had been a failure.

uring his senior year at Princeton University, Buechner received the Irene Glascock Prize for poetry, and he also began working on his first novel and one of his greatest critical successes: A Long Day's Dying, published in 1950.The contrast between the success of his first novel and the commercial failure of his second, The Seasons' Difference (1952), a novel with characters based on Buechner and his adolescent friend James Merrill which developed a more explicit Christian theme,[20] was palpably felt by the young novelist, and it was on this note that Buechner left his teaching position at Lawrenceville to move to New York City and focus on his writing career. In 1952, Buechner began lecturing at New York University, and once again received critical acclaim for his short story "The Tiger," published in The New Yorker, which won the O. Henry Award in 1955. Also during this time, he began attending the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church, where George Buttrick was pastor. It was during one of Buttrick's sermons that Buechner heard the words that inspired his ordination: Buttrick described the inward coronation of Christ as taking place in the hearts of those who believe in him "among confession, and tears, and great laughter." The impact of this phrase on Buechner was so great that he eventually entered the Union Theological Seminary in 1954, on a Rockefeller Brothers Theological Fellowship.

In the summer of 1967, after nine years at Exeter and having established the Religion Department, Buechner moved with his family to their farmhouse in Vermont to live year-round. Buechner describes their house in Now and Then:

Our house is on the eastern slope of Rupert Mountain, just off a country road, still unpaved then, and five miles from the nearest town ... Even at the most unpromising times of year – in mudtime, on bleak, snowless winter days – it is in so many unexpected ways beautiful that even after all this time I have never quite gotten used to it. I have seen other places equally beautiful in my time, but never, anywhere, have I seen one more so.

There Buechner dedicated himself full-time to writing. However, in 1968, Buechner received a letter from Charles Price, the chaplain at Harvard, inviting him to give the Noble Lectures series in the winter of 1969. His predecessors in this role included Richard Niebuhr and George Buttrick, and Buechner was both flattered and daunted by the idea of joining so august a group. When he voiced his concerns, Price replied that he should write "something in the area of 'religion and letters.'"Thence came the idea to write about the everyday events of life, Buechner writes in Now and Then: "as the alphabet through which God, of his grace, spells out his words, his meaning, to us. So The Alphabet of Grace was the title I hit upon, and what I set out to do was to try to describe a single representative day of my life in a way to suggest what there was of God to hear in it."

Buechner continued to publish occasionally; his last book, A Crazy, Holy Grace: The Healing Power of Pain and Memory, was released in 2017. It is a collection of essays. All but one have been published previously.

Buechner died on August 15, 2022, at his home in Rupert, Vermont.

Courtesy--wikipedia
- Frederick Buechner

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