https://www.frederickbuechner.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Buechner

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/19982.Frederick_Buechner
(reader reviews)

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/author/frederick-buechner/
(three Kirkus reviews)

https://www.google.com/search?q=frederick+buechner&rlz=1CAJMBU_enUS1019&source=lnms&tbm=vid&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjUhPDfsMv5AhXAkIkEHVDmC6kQ_AUoA3oECAMQBQ&biw=1366&bih=649&dpr=1
(videos, including a PBS interview)

https://religionnews.com/2022/08/15/frederick-buechner-dies/

Frederick Buechner, popular Christian ‘writer’s writer’ and ‘minister’s minister,’ dies at 96

Excerpt:
....His studies at Princeton University were interrupted by World War II, but he completed his bachelor’s degree in English in 1948. He quickly achieved fame with the 1950 publication of his first novel, “A Long Day’s Dying.”

When his second novel, in his own words, “fared as badly as the first one had fared well,” he moved to New York City to lecture at New York University and focus on his writing.

It was in New York City that he had an experience that changed the course of his life and work: He began attending Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church. Growing up, neither side of his family had a “church connection of any kind,” as he put it, but he went because he happened to live next door and “because I had nothing else to do on a Sunday,” he recounted in a video posted on YouTube by the Frederick Buechner Center.

One Sunday he was struck by a particular turn of phrase by the church’s pastor, the Rev. George Buttrick: “Christ is crowned in the hearts of those who love him and believe in him amidst confession and tears and great laughter.”

He recounted: “I was so taken aback by ‘great laughter’ that I found the tears springing to my eyes.”

He later told Buttrick he wanted to learn more about Christianity, to more than simply join the church. The pastor pointed the young writer to Union Theological Seminary — with some misgivings. Buechner quoted Buttrick in his autobiography “The Sacred Journey” as saying, “It would be a shame to lose a good novelist for a mediocre preacher.”...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/15/books/frederick-buechner-dead.html

By Robert D. McFadden
Aug. 15, 2022

Frederick Buechner, a Presbyterian minister who never held a church pastorate but found his calling writing a prodigious quantity of novels, memoirs and essays that explored the human condition from inspirational and often humorous religious perspectives, died on Monday at his home in Rupert, Vt. He was 96.

His son-in-law and literary executor, David Altshuler, confirmed the death.

Drawing on literary and theological credentials over six decades, Mr. Buechner (pronounced BEEK-ner) published 39 books, many of them well-received fictional excursions into the adventures of charlatans, lovers, historical or biblical characters and ordinary people who take on self-imposed superhuman challenges and stoop to only-too-human skulduggery, all in the name of God.

His 10th novel, “Godric” (1980), the first-person tale of a 12th-century English holy man who purifies his soul of the mortal sin of pride, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1981. His “Lion Country” (1971), a novel about a pedophilic former jailbird who ministers to the faithful as a fake pastor in a phony church, was a National Book Award finalist in 1972.

While he was best known for his novels, some translated into 27 languages, Mr. Buechner also wrote poetry, literary reviews, essays on secular subjects and “meditations” on religious matters. He lectured widely at colleges and universities and delivered sermons in the United States and Europe. His four autobiographies professed to find divine grace everywhere in the human experience.

Where does a Christian novelist get his ideas? For Mr. Buechner, the protagonist of his “Book of Bebb” quartet — “Lion Country” followed by “Open Heart” (1972), “Love Feast” (1974) and “Treasure Hunt” (1974) — was conceived in a barbershop, as he was waiting his turn and reading a magazine. The image of an antihero floated up like a mystical vision, and it dominated his writing for years.

In a memoir, he recalled the character: “He was a plump, bald, ebullient southerner who had once served five years in a prison on a charge of exposing himself before a group of children and was now the head of a religious diploma mill in Florida and of a seedy flat-roofed stucco church called the Church of Holy Love, Incorporated. He wore a hat that looked too small for him. He had a trick eyelid that every once in awhile fluttered shut on him. His name was Leo Bebb.”...

(snip)