There are scenes that are unsuitable for twelve-year-olds. My eldest child, Colin, who is now fifty-three, was twelve when he first read Garp-in manuscript, and with me awaiting his reaction. We should be ashamed that sexual intolerance is still tolerated, but it is. It’s not good news that Garp is still relevant. The World According to Garp isn’t prescient, but sexual hatred hasn’t gone away. Garp is an angry and a comic novel-a feminist novel and an ode to the women’s movement, which is at once exalted and satirized-but, above all (I thought), Garp is a period piece.

In 1978, when Garp was published, I thought I’d written a period piece. In short, I thought sexual discrimination was too backward and too stupid to last. In 1976–77, when I was living in Massachusetts and Vermont, where I finished Garp, it was inconceivable to me that the sexual violence I was writing about would long endure. In retrospect, it’s unnecessary to say that Garp is a worst-case scenario or that I am a doomsayer novelist, but in 1972–75-when I was teaching at the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City, where I began writing Garp-I was worried that the subject of sexual hatred (of intolerance of sexual minorities, and sexual differences) would be outdated before I finished the novel. In rewriting this new introduction to Garp, of course I found things to cut or change in that 1998 afterword, and I found a lot of necessary things to add. Rewriting is the unglamorous part of creating, but revision is essential for clarity. Twenty years ago, which was twenty years after The World According to Garp was published, I wrote an afterword to the novel. As he says in the following introduction to the anniversary edition, exclusive to, he did not anticipate the dark themes of his comic novel to be so timeless: 'It’s not good news that Garp is still relevant.' To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Garp' s publication (and its first ebook edition), Irving looks back on his groundbreaking novel and considers how it reflects our current times-a truth he did not expect when he was writing it decades ago. Two of its central themes are those of sexual violence and intolerance, subjects that Irving felt were at their peak when he was writing the book that would make him a household name. Its scope is large, its storytelling Dickensian, and it perfectly encapsulated contemporary American culture at its most divisive and malignant. Garp, Irving's comic novel is full of idiosyncratic characters-the successful writer Garp, his accidental feminist icon mother, a former football player turned transgender activist, and a supporting cast of assassins and suburban seductresses and cult members and unicycling bears and fortune tellers. Following the life of its titular character T. Four decades later, The World According to Garp remains one of Irving's most masterful books. In 1978, John Irving published his fourth novel-the one that became his first bestseller.

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