A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICEDuring his fifty-eight-year lifetime Donald Barthelme published more than one hundred short stories in The New Yorker and authored sixteen books. He was a contemporary and friend of Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, Susan Sontag, and Norman Mailer, and has received recent tributes from Dave Eggers and George Saunders. He had a volatile private life and his search for a place in American letters took him across the country, briefly to Denmark, and through a host of occupations. When he wasn't hiding, he was passionately searching and living. Barthelme's writing is a found-art-style mix of pop culture and high literature that is surprisingly funny and playful. This "excellent biography" (The New Yorker) "pursue[s] Barthelme's art to its shuddering core. . . . The enthusiasm is catching" (The Wall Street Journal).