Frederick Buechner
Carl Frederick Buechner was an American author, Presbyterian minister, preacher, and theologian. The author of thirty-nine published books, his career spanned more than six decades and encompassed many different genres. He wrote novels, including Godric '', A Long Day's Dying and The Book of Bebb, his memoirs, including The Sacred Journey, and theological works, such as Secrets in the Dark, The Magnificent Defeat, and Telling the Truth.
Buechner was named "without question one of the truly great writers of the 20th century" by viaLibri, a "major talent" by The New York Times, and "one of our most original storytellers" by USA Today''. Annie Dillard called him "one of our finest writers." Buechner's works have been compared to C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton and have been translated into twenty-seven languages.
Buechner was a finalist for the National Book Award, presented by the National Book Foundation, and has been awarded eight honorary degrees from such institutions as Yale University and the Virginia Theological Seminary. 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.
Life and career
Early life
Carl Frederick Buechner, the eldest son of Katherine Golay 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.Bermuda
Immediately following his father's death, the family moved to Bermuda, where they remained until World War II forced the evacuation of Americans from the island. In Bermuda, Buechner experienced "the blessed relief of coming out of the dark and unmentionable sadness of my father's life and death into fragrance and greenness and light". For a young Buechner, Bermuda became home.Bermuda left a lasting impression on Buechner. The distinctly British flavor of pre-World War II Bermuda provided in him a lifelong appreciation of English custom and culture, which would later inspire such works as Godric and Brendan. Buechner also frequently mentions Bermuda in his memoirs, including Telling Secrets and The Sacred Journey.
Education and military service
Buechner then attended the Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, graduating in 1943. While at Lawrenceville, he met the future Pulitzer Prize winning poet James Merrill; their friendship and rivalry inspired the literary ambitions of both. As Mel Gussow wrote in Merrill's 1995 obituary: "their friendly competition was an impetus for each becoming a writer." Buechner then enrolled at Princeton University. His college career was interrupted by—in Buechner's words—"two years of very undistinguished service" in the Army during World War II, "all of it at several different places in the United States," including a post as "chief of the statistical section in Camp Pickett, Virginia." After the war, he returned to Princeton and graduated with an A.B. in English in 1948 after completing a 77-page senior thesis titled "Notes of the Function of Metaphor in English Poetry." However, as an alumnus, he remained identified as a member of his original Class of 1947. Regarding his time at Princeton, Buechner commented in an interview:Literary success and ordination
During 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, a novel with characters based on Buechner and his adolescent friend James Merrill which developed a more explicit Christian theme, 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 of Columbia University in 1954, on a Rockefeller Brothers Theological Fellowship.While at Union, Buechner studied under such renowned theologians as Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, and James Muilenburg, who helped Buechner in his search for understanding:
Buechner's decision to enter the seminary had come as a great surprise to those who knew him. Even George Buttrick, whose words had so inspired Buechner, observed that, "It would be a shame to lose a good novelist for a mediocre preacher." Nevertheless, Buechner's ministry and writing have ever since served to enhance each other's message.
Following his first year at Union, Buechner decided to take the 1955–56 school year off to continue his writing. In the spring of 1955, shortly before he left Union for the year, Buechner met his wife Judith at a dance given by some family friends. They were married a year later by James Muilenburg in Montclair, N.J., and spent the next four months traveling in Europe. During this year, Buechner also completed his third novel, The Return of Ansel Gibbs.
After his sabbatical, Buechner returned to Union to complete the two further years necessary to receive a Bachelor of Divinity. He was ordained on June 1, 1958, at the same Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church where he had heard George Buttrick preach four years earlier. Buechner was ordained as an evangelist, or minister without pastoral charge. Shortly before graduation, as he considered his future role as minister of a parish, he received a letter from Robert Russell Wicks, formerly the Dean of the Chapel at Princeton, who had since begun serving as school minister at Phillips Exeter Academy. Wicks offered him the job of instituting a new, full-time religion department at Exeter; Buechner decided to take the opportunity to return to teaching and to develop a program that taught religion in depth.
Exeter
In September 1958, the Buechners moved to Exeter. There, Buechner faced the challenge of creating a new religion department and academically rigorous curriculum that would challenge the often cynical views of his new students. "My job, as I saw it, was to defend the Christian faith against its 'cultured despisers,' to use Schleiermacher's phrase. To put it more positively, it was to present the faith as appealingly, honestly, relevantly, and skillfully as I could." During his tenure at Exeter, Buechner taught courses in both the Religion and English departments and served as school chaplain and minister. Also during this time, the family grew to include three daughters. For the school year 1963–64, the Buechners took a sabbatical on their farm in Rupert, Vermont, during which time Buechner returned to his writing; his fourth book, The Final Beast, was published in 1965. As the first book he had written since his ordination, The Final Beast represented a new style for Buechner, one in which he combined his dual callings as minister and as author.Buechner recalls of his accomplishments at Exeter: "All told, we were there for nine years with one year's leave of absence tucked in the middle, and by the time we left, the religion department had grown from only one full-time teacher, namely myself, and about twenty students, to four teachers and something in the neighborhood, as I remember, of three hundred students or more." Among these students was the future author John Irving, who included a quotation from Buechner as an epigraph of his book A Prayer for Owen Meany. One of Buechner's biographers, Marjorie Casebier McCoy, describes the effect of his time at Exeter as follows: "Buechner in his sermons had been attempting to reach out to the "cultured despisers of religion." The students and faculty at Phillips Exeter had been, for the most part, just that when he had arrived at the school, and it had been they who compelled him to hone his preaching and literary skills to their utmost in order to get a hearing for Christian faith."
Vermont and last years
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: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, a collection of essays, was released in 2017.
Buechner died on August 15, 2022, at his home in Rupert, Vermont.