University of Pittsburgh

The University of Pittsburgh is part of John Irving’s educational background and appears briefly in his account of the development and structure of The World According to Garp. Its direct biographical connection to Irving sits alongside a more literary one: the novel’s eventual shape emerged from a succession of possible beginnings, each foregrounding a different subject.

Irving’s Education

Irving attended the University of Pittsburgh before graduating from the University of New Hampshire in 1965. His studies also included Phillips Exeter Academy and the Institute for European Studies in Vienna; he later earned an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. The University of Pittsburgh is thus one stage in an educational history that preceded his career as a novelist and teacher.

A Point in the Novel’s Changing Design

In reflecting on The World According to Garp, Irving describes how uncertain he once was about whether Garp or his mother, Jenny Fields, was the novel’s principal character. He considered opening with the chapter about Mrs. Ralph, but that arrangement would have required a 313-page flashback. He also tried beginning with the chapter called The Eternal Husband, whose opening sentence places marriage beside lumber in Garp’s phone directory. That version made the hazards of marriage, and particularly lust’s threat to marriage, seem central.

Irving later considered beginning with the chapter about what Garp wanted to be when he grew up. That opening would have emphasized Garp’s ambition to become a writer and the novel’s interest in the formation of a novelist. The University of Pittsburgh itself is not presented as the setting for these design decisions; it belongs to the account of Irving’s education, while the changing openings reveal how the book’s emphasis shifted during composition.

Structure and Thematic Range

The rejected openings expose the novel’s breadth rather than settling it on a single subject. A beginning centered on marriage would have brought desire and marital danger to the foreground; one centered on Garp’s vocation would have made writing and the novelist’s imagination more immediately visible. Another possible beginning reached back to the founding of Steering Academy in 1781, where Everett Steering’s educational ambition for his sons, but not his daughters, introduces sexual polarization into the novel’s history.

These alternatives show a book whose concerns intersect: family history, gender, marriage, and authorship can each serve as an entry into the larger narrative. Irving’s account also notes that he knew the events of the epilogue before he began writing and understood the epilogue as a way of warning about the future while appearing to close the past. The novel’s design therefore treats beginnings and endings as matters of perspective, not merely as points on a timeline.