Tod Williams wrote and directed The Door in the Floor, the 2004 film adapted from Mr. In 2000, Irving won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Cider House Rules - a Lasse Hallström film with seven Academy Award nominations. (He competed as a wrestler for twenty years, until he was thirty-four, and coached the sport until he was forty-seven). Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma. 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. Irving's novels are now translated into thirty-five foreign languages, and he has had nine international bestsellers. Tony Richardson wrote and directed the adaptation for the screen of The Hotel New Hampshire (1984). 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.

'Yount was the first person to point out that anything I did except writing was going to be vaguely unsatisfying.' Although he excelled in English at school and knew by the time he graduated that he wanted to write novels, it was not until he met a young Southern novelist named John Yount, at the University of New Hampshire, that he received encouragement. John Irving was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1942, and he once admitted that he was a 'grim' child.

Setting free the bears