Cultural Writing. Autobiography. As a student at DePauw University in 1952, John Gardner kept a notebook to which he gave the seemingly playful title LIES! LIES! LIES! With the journal shaping his discipline, Gardner as a teacher is his own best student. He writes character sketches, scenes, poems, parodies, polemics arguing with critics and teachers -- then tests and questions his own words (he calls the journal LIES! LIES! LIES! To remind himself that his opinions are provisional). Again and again he formulates strategies that he will incarnate in novels ... The journal, then, gives its writer a chance to discover what works and what doesn't -- Thomas Gavin, from the Introduction. The journal is reproduced here in a facsimile edition, preserving the writer's clear and fastidious penmanship, followed by a printed transcription of the text.

John Champlin Gardner, Jr. (July 21, 1933 - September 14, 1982) was a well-known and controversial American novelist and university professor, best known for his novel Grendel, a retelling of the Beowulf myth.