Barthelme, Donald (1931-1989)

US writer. His innovative short stories, often first published in the New Yorker magazine, display a minimalist economy and a playful sense of the absurd and irrational, as in the collection Sixty Stories (1981). He also wrote the novellas Snow White (1967), The Dead Father (1975), Paradise (1986), and The King (1991). Barthelme's works have been seen as model texts for literary criticism based on Deconstruction.