Donald Barthelme

Donald Barthelme (1931-1989) was an American essayist, novelist, and short story writer. He is best known in the literary world for his "fragments": brief, humorous, often plotless tales that occasionally feature public fictional or real persons (The Joker's Greatest Triumph, Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning) or reworkings of stories by others (The Phantom of the Opera's Friend). Some of his fragments have been made into video shorts. Many of his fragments include pictures clipped or copied, seemingly at random, from books and magazines and labeled with incongruous captions ("a secret vice gone public": Barthelme's introduction to the collection "Guilty Pleasures").