Author Frederick Buechner was an American who wrote novels, poems, essays, sermons, and books on religion. He died at the age of 96. His death has not yet been explained to the public.
He wrote over thirty novels and was ordained a Presbyterian minister. His career spans over 60 years and he has written fiction, autobiographies, essays and sermons, among others.
Buechner’s books have been written in many languages and published around the world. The books A Long Day’s Dying, The Book of Bebb, Godric (nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1981) and Brendan are those for which people know him best.
His religious books, like Secrets in the Dark, and his autobiographies, like Telling Secrets and The Sacred Journey.
Frederic Buechner
What was the cause of Frederick Buechner’s death at the age of 96?
A tweet says Frederick Buechner died peacefully at age 96, but the exact cause of his death has yet to be made public.
USA Today called him “one of our most creative storytellers”. The New York Times said he had “major skills” and was “a very fine writer indeed”. Annie Dillard, author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, calls Frederick Buechner one of our best writers.
Buechner has eight honorary degrees from universities, including Yale University and Virginia Theological Seminary. The National Book Foundation nominated it for the National Book Award.
Buechner also won awards from the American Academy and the Institute of Arts and Letters, the O. Henry Prize, the Rosenthal Prize, the Christianity and Literature Belles Lettres Prize, and other groups.
Where did Frederick Buechner meet his wife?
Frederick Buechner first met Judith at a ball hosted by family friends. A year later, James Muilenburg married them in Montclair, New Jersey. Then they went on a four-month honeymoon in Europe. The Return of Ansel Gibbs, Buechner’s third book, is also complete.
After his hiatus, Buechner returned to Union to complete the final two years of his bachelor’s degree in theology. On June 1, 1958, he was ordained at the same Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church where he had heard George Buttrick preach four years earlier. Buechner was ordained a minister, but not a pastor or an evangelist.
Before graduating, Robert Russell Wicks sent him a letter. They were once the Dean of the Princeton Chapel. Now they are the minister of school at Phillips Exeter Academy. He was thinking about how he would become a parish pastor at the time.
When Wicks gave him the job of setting up a brand new full-time religion department at Exeter, Buechner seized the opportunity to return to the classroom and take a course that taught religion in depth.
Learn more about the Frederick Buechner family
Carl Frederick Buechner, the eldest of his two sons, was born in New York on July 11, 1926. Carl Frederick and Katherine Kuhn are his father and mother. Although both of Buechner’s parents came from wealthy upper-class homes, his immediate family was never more than modestly wealthy.
When Buechner was ten years old, his father, a Princeton graduate and small executive who moved from job to job and place to place along the East Coast during the Depression, committed suicide in taking too much carbon monoxide.
Frederick and his brother James saw their father’s body in the driveway as their mother and grandmother desperately tried to save him. Both will always remember what happened.
