Illinois Authors

Knopf : New York : ©1977.

A collection of humorous verses about animals, friendly or otherwise.

Bantam, New York : 1978, ©1975.

Four fairy tales featuring a dragon, a giant, a cunning mule, and a little chimney-girl.

Four fairy tales featuring a dragon, a giant, a cunning mule, and a little chimney-girl.

The first and most terrifying monster in English literature, from the great early epic Beowulf, tells his own side of the story.

Knopf; [distributed by Random House] New York, 1973.

A modern retelling of the ancient Greek myth depicting the love of Jason, the hero who claimed the kingdom of Iolcus, and the princess of Caechis, Medeia.

The critically acclaimed final masterwork of John Gardner: an American novel haunted with macabre and cerebral elements. The final novel by Gardner, Mickelsson's Ghosts, originally published in 1982 just months before his untimely death in a motorcycle accident, is a tour de force. The protagonist Peter Mickelsson, a former star philosophy professor at Brown, relocates to Binghamton University. On the verge of bankruptcy, separated from his wife, in questionable mental health, and drinking heavily, Mickelsson decides to buy a country house in northeastern Pennsylvania. What he encounters there are impassioned and shameless love affairs (one of which results in a regrettable pregnancy), a Mormon extremist cult, small town mythologies, the robbery of a robber, multiple murders, the ghosts of an incestuous family, Plato, and our hero's own possible insanity.

Ballantine Books, New York : 1975, ©1973.

Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg : 1980.

Basic Books, New York : ©1978.

Argues that great moral fiction has open-mindedly tested human values in an attempt to discover what best promotes human fulfillment and that current fiction fails to do so and, thus, undermines our experience of literature and our faith in ourselves.

Southern Illinois University Press Carbondale, [1974]

A biography of the medieval English author who wrote The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, The Legend of Good Women, and other works.

Knopf ; [distributed by Random House], New York : 1972.

A stolid, law-and-order policeman in western N.Y. state encounters a mad hippie who paints the word LOVE on the street, escapes from jail, helps another prisoner escape, and, in the process, murders a policeman. The hunt is on....

Ballantine Books, New York : [1972]