Diane Andrews Henningfeld is an associate professor at Adrian College and has written extensively for a variety of educational and academic publishers. In the following essay she examines the autobiographical and thematic importance of "Redemption" and relates it to the rest of Gardner's work.

At the time of his death in 1982, the result of a motorcycle accident, John Gardner was considered one of the most prolific, talented, and controversial writers of his generation. His output was prodigious, spanning genres and ideas with ease. Not content to write only fiction, he also produced literary criticism, children's books, plays, poetry,and biography. He was insistent on the role that fiction should play in the world, and made these claims explicit in books such as On Moral Fiction, The Art of Fiction, and On Becoming a Novelist, and in the scores of interviews he granted. By placing his assertions...