Donald Barthelme has achieved his present eminence as one of the leading popular innovators in American fiction through the pages of the New Yorker magazine, where he began publishing in 1963. But, although he is best known for his stiff-upper-lip sentences and urban, upper-middle-class situations, his roots are in Texas. Born in Philadelphia on 7 April 1931, where his parents were attending the University of Pennsylvania, he moved at an early age to Houston, where his father rose to prominence as an architect in the style of Mies and Corbu. Texas language and Texas situations occasionally show up in Barthelme's stories, as do the Roman Catholicism of his youth and the experiences he had as a reporter, university publications writer, editor, and art museum director (all in Houston). He moved to New York City in 1962 to edit the only two issues of Harold Rosenberg's and Thomas Hess's art and literature journal...