Donald Barthelme

This article is about the author, Donald Barthelme Jr. For his father, the architect, see Donald Barthelme (architect).

Donald Barthelme (April 7, 1931 – July 23, 1989) was an American author known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, was managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1961–1962), co-founder of Fiction (with Mark Mirsky and the assistance of Max and Marianne Frisch), and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.

Life

Donald Barthelme was born in Philadelphia in 1931. His father and mother were fellow students at the University of Pennsylvania. The family moved to Texas two years later and Barthelme's father became a professor of architecture at the University of Houston, where Barthelme would later study journalism. Barthelme won a Scholastic Writing Award in Short Story in 1949, while a student at Lamar High School in Houston.

Donald Barthelme (architect)

Donald Barthelme, Sr. (August 4, 1907 – July 16, 1996) was an architect in Houston, Texas, a teacher of architecture as a professor at the University of Houston and Rice University, and the father of novelist Donald Barthelme, Jr..

Barthelme was born on August 4, 1907 in Galveston, Texas. After studying at the Rice Institute in Houston for two years, in 1926 he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1930. That same year he married Helen Bechtold of Philadelphia. After graduation he worked as an architect in Philadelphia until late in 1932, when he returned to Texas.

A highlight of Barthelme's early career in Texas was his work on the Texas Centennial Exposition, for which he was the lead designer of the exposition's centerpiece building, the Hall of State, which is considered a masterpiece of the Art Deco style and is now the home of the Dallas Historical Society. After the outbreak of World War II he worked on war-related projects. He was a designer on the Avion Village Housing Project near Dallas and later was supervising architect for the Big Spring Air Base in West Texas and war-related housing projects in Galveston and Sweeny, Texas.