Frederick Buechner

Buechner was introduced to Judith while he was a student at the Union Theological Seminary. They were married, in 1956, by James Muilenberg in Montclair, N.J. The couple has 3 daughters– Katherine, Dinah, and Sharman.

In 2008, ‘The Buechner Institute’, which conducts an annual lecture, was inaugurated at King College. Barbara Brown Taylor, Ron Hansen, Katherine Paterson, Marilynne Robinson and Kathleen Norris have been guest-lecturers.

Carl Frederick Buechner was born in New York City. He is the oldest son of Katherine Kuhn and Carl Frederick Buechner. The family could not settle in a place for long as Carl was often changing jobs.

His father, overpowered by a sense of failure, committed suicide in 1936. The family then moved to Bermuda. But World War II forced Americans like them to leave the island for safety.

He passed out of the Lawrenceville School, New Jersey, in 1943. At Lawrenceville, he became friends with James Merrill, a poet who would then win the Pulitzer Prize, and began to nurture literary ambitions.

He joined Princeton University, but his studies there were interrupted by his military service between 1944 and 1946. He returned to Princeton and obtained his B. A.

In 1950, Buechner published his first novel, ‘A Long Day's Dying’ which is his most successful novel, his style drawing favorable comparison to that of Henry James and Marcel Proust.

His second novel ‘The Season's Difference’, published in 1952, was a commercial failure. Determined to focus on his writing career, he moved to New York City and began teaching at Lawrenceville.

He began attending the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church. Its pastor George Buttrick’s preaching inspired him to join the Union Theological Seminary in 1954, on a Rockefeller Brothers Theological Fellowship.

At the seminary, he was taught by eminent theologians, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and James Muilenberg. They had a positive influence on his writings and career as a minister.

At the end of his first year at the seminary, in 1955, he took a sabbatical and toured Europe for the next few months. He completed his third novel, ‘The Return of Ansel Gibbs’.

The Book of Bebb tetralogy published between 1972 and 1977, consisted of the novels, ‘Lion Country’, ‘Open Heart’, ‘Love Feast’ and ‘Treasure Hunt’. The tetralogy became very popular and won many accolades.

‘Godric’, published in 1980, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He took care not to use archaic language.