Biography
Wharton was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Upper Darby High School in 1943, and was inducted into the school's Wall of Fame in 1997. During World War II, Wharton served in the United States Army and was first assigned to an engineering unit. He was transferred to the infantry, and was severely wounded in the Battle of the Bulge. After his discharge, he attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where he received an undergraduate degree in art and a doctorate in psychology, later teaching art in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
His first novel Birdy was published in 1978 when he was more than 50 years old. Birdy was a critical and popular success and it won the U.S. National Book Award in category First Novel. Alan Parker directed a film version starring Nicolas Cage and Matthew Modine. After the publication of Birdy and through the early 1990s, Wharton published eight novels, including Dad and A Midnight Clear, both of which were also made into films, the former starring Jack Lemmon.
Many of the protagonists of Wharton's novels, despite having different names and backgrounds, have similar experiences, attitudes, and traits that lead one to presume that they are partly autobiographical. There is precious little certifiable biography available about Wharton / Du Aime. Based on the novels, one can surmise that he served in France and Germany in World War II in the 87th Infantry Division, was a painter, spent part of his adult life living on a houseboat as an artist in France, raised four children, was a reasonably skilled carpenter and handyman, and suffered from profound gastrointestinal problems.
In 1988, Wharton's daughter, Kate, his son-in-law Bill, and their two children, two-year-old Dayiel and eight-month-old Mia, were killed in a horrific 23-car motor vehicle accident near Albany, Oregon, that was caused by smoke generated by grass-burning on nearby farmland. Wharton wrote a (mostly) non-fiction book, Ever After: A Father's True Story (1995), which recounts the incidents leading to the accident, his family's subsequent grief, and the three years which he devoted to pursuing redress in the Oregon court system for the field-burning that caused the accident. Houseboat on Seine, a memoir, was published in 1996, about Wharton's purchase and renovation of a houseboat.
It is worth noting that he gained an enormous and unusual popularity in Poland, where many extra editions as well as visits followed and eventually some works were prepared and published only in Polish (see the Bibliography).
Wharton died on 29 October 2008 of an infection that he contracted while hospitalized for blood-pressure problems.
Read more about this topic: William Wharton (author)
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