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Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Alfred Publishing Co. Inc.: Three lines from “Four Strong Winds” by Ian Tyson, copyright © 1963 (renewed) by Warner Bros. Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Alfred Publishing Co. Inc.

Henry Holt and Company, LLC: Excerpt from “The Gift Outright” from The Poetry of Robert Frost edited by Edward Connery Lathem, copyright © 1942 by Robert Frost and copyright renewed 1970 by Lesley Frost Ballantine, copyright © 1969 by Henry Holt and Company. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

Excerpt from In One Person copyright © 2012 by Garp Enterprises, Ltd.

Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.

A PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY. Copyright © 1989 by Garp Enterprises, Ltd. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST WILLIAM MORROW PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED 2012.

ISBN 978-0-06-220409-7

EPub Edition © MARCH 2012 ISBN 9780062204103

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P.S.

Insights, Interviews & More …

About the author

Meet John Irving

About the book

My Favorite First Sentence

Read on

More from John Irving

About the Author

* * *

Meet John Irving

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP, which won the National Book Award in 1980, was John Irving’s fourth novel and his first international bestseller; it also became a George Roy Hill film. Tony Richardson wrote and directed the adaptation for the screen of The Hotel New Hampshire (1984). Irving’s novels are now translated into thirty-five languages, and he has had nine international bestsellers. Worldwide, the Irving novel most often called “an American classic” is A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), the portrayal of an enduring friendship at that time when the Vietnam War had its most divisive effect on the United States.

In 1992, John Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma. (He competed as a wrestler for twenty years, until he was thirty-four, and coached the sport until he was forty-seven.) In 2000, Irving won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules—a Lasse Hallström film that earned seven Academy Award nominations. Tod Williams wrote and directed The Door in the Floor—the 2004 film adapted from Mr. Irving’s ninth novel, A Widow for One Year.

In One Person (2012) is John Irving’s thirteenth novel.

About the Book

* * *

My Favorite First Sentence

I MAY ONE DAY write a better first sentence to a novel than that of A Prayer for Owen Meany, but I doubt it. I have a feeling for first sentences, and I’ve written some pretty good ones. As is my habit, however, I wrote the last sentence of The World According to Garp before I wrote the first one. “But in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.” The actual first sentence isn’t bad. “Garp’s mother, Jenny Fields, was arrested in Boston in 1942 for wounding a man in a movie theater.” It works. After all, the primary function of a first sentence is to make you keep reading.

The first sentence of The Cider House Rules also has some staying power. “In the hospital of the orphanage—the boys’ division at St. Cloud’s, Maine—two nurses were in charge of naming the new babies and checking that their little penises were healing from the obligatory circumcision.” The juxtaposition of naming baby boys and examining their penises has a certain charm, and many readers will wonder (rightly) why the circumcision is “obligatory.”