18 Facts About Frederick Buechner

Carl Frederick Buechner was an American author, Presbyterian minister, preacher, and theologian.

Frederick Buechner wrote novels, including Godric, A Long Day's Dying and The Book of Bebb, his memoirs, including The Sacred Journey, and theological works, such as Secrets in the Dark, The Magnificent Defeat, and Telling the Truth.

Frederick Buechner was a finalist for the National Book Award, presented by the National Book Foundation, and has been awarded eight honorary degrees from such institutions as Yale University and the Virginia Theological Seminary.

In Bermuda, Frederick Buechner experienced "the blessed relief of coming out of the dark and unmentionable sadness of my father's life and death into fragrance and greenness and light".

Frederick Buechner then attended the Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, graduating in 1943.

In 1952, Frederick Buechner began lecturing at New York University and received critical acclaim for his short story "The Tiger", published in The New Yorker, which was awarded third prize in the 1955 O Henry Awards.

Frederick Buechner was ordained on June 1,1958, at the same Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church where he had heard George Buttrick preach four years earlier.

Frederick Buechner was ordained as an evangelist, or minister without pastoral charge.

Wicks offered him the job of instituting a new, full-time religion department at Exeter; Frederick Buechner decided to take the opportunity to return to teaching and to develop a program that taught religion in depth.

However, in 1968, Frederick Buechner received a letter from Charles Price, the chaplain at Harvard, inviting him to give the Noble Lectures series in the winter of 1969.

Frederick Buechner continued to publish occasionally; his last book, A Crazy, Holy Grace: The Healing Power of Pain and Memory, a collection of essays, was released in 2017.

Frederick Buechner died on August 15,2022, at his home in Rupert, Vermont.

Frederick Buechner's first such work, The Magnificent Defeat, is a collection of sermons, signifying his growth into his career as a minister at Exeter.

Frederick Buechner came, unexpected and unbidden, from a part of myself no less mysterious and inaccessible than the part where dreams come from; and little by little there came with him a whole world of people and places that was as heretofore unknown to me as Bebb was himself.

Frederick Buechner has been one of our most interesting and least predictable writers.

Dale Brown, the founding director of the Frederick Buechner Institute, was the author of numerous articles and the recent critical biography, The Book of Frederick Buechner: A Journey Through His Writings.

The Frederick Buechner Institute sponsored weekly convocations in Memorial Chapel on the campus of King University that featured speakers from a variety of backgrounds who examined the ways in which faith informs art and public life and cultivate conversation about what faith has to do with books, politics, social discourse, music, visual arts, and more.

Frederick Buechner's work has been praised highly by many reviewers of books, with the distinct exception of his second novel, The Season's Difference, which was universally panned by critics and remains his biggest commercial flop.