He began attending Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church and decided to become a Christian after hearing one of pastor George Buttrick’s sermons.ĥ. In 1953, Buechner moved to Manhattan to become a full-time writer and released his second novel to mixed or terrible reviews. It was optioned for a film in 1954, which never got past the script stage.Ĥ. Reviewers compared him to Marcel Proust and Henry James, and celebrities like Leonard Bernstein and Christopher Isherwood praised the book. In 1950, Buechner’s first novel, A Long Day’s Dying, was published with positive reviews in TIME, Newsweek, and Life. Photo Credit: Wikipedia Commons/Blake Gardnerģ. Here is what you need to know about this perceptive writer. Dale Brown observed in The Book of Buechner that the writer had “become an oft-quoted source of pulpit anecdotes, devotional tidbits, and magazine fillers.” He received praise from Christian artists all over the political/philosophical spectrum-from Annie Dillard to Philip Yancey, from Reynolds Price to Madeleine L’Engle, from Anne Lamott to Makoto Fujimura. While he was never a big name in Christian bookstores, Buechner gained a committed following. In Reading Buechner, Jeffrey Munroe called him “neither liberal nor conservative… nor evangelical nor mainline.” Slipping between readers' comfortable categories made Buechner a surprising author when they discovered him. Secular publications praised his work, but many reviewers struggled to accept a minister who wrote fiction. He was an ordained Presbyterian minister, but his sermons and novels tackled complex subjects. After that, he lived in an interesting in-between territory. He made a big splash in the New York literary scene with his first novel A Long Day’s Dying, then surprised everyone by entering seminary. The late, great Frederick Buechner (1926-2022) had a surprising place in religious circles.
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