William Wharton

• Name — William Wharton • Birth Name — Albert William Du Aime • Born — 7 November 1925 • Birthplace — Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. • Died — 29 October 2008 (aged 82) • Place of death — Encinitas, California, U.S. • Education — University of California, Los Angeles (BA, MA, PhD) • Period — 1978–2008 • Genre — Popular fiction • Awards — National Book Award

Wharton was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to "a poor, hard-working, Catholic family". He graduated from Upper Darby High School in 1943. (He was inducted into the school's Wall of Fame in 1997.) During World War II, Wharton served in the United States Army and was first assigned to an engineering unit. He was transferred to the infantry and was severely wounded in the Battle of the Bulge. His memoirs included an account of his role in the killing of German prisoners during the war. "War for me, though brief, had been a soul-shaking trauma. I was scared, miserable, and I lost confidence in human beings, especially myself." After his discharge, he attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where he received an undergraduate degree in art and a doctorate in psychology.

He taught art in the Los Angeles Unified School District. His first novel, Birdy, was published in 1978. Birdy was a critical and popular success and it won the US National Book Award in category First Novel. Alan Parker directed a film version starring Nicolas Cage and Matthew Modine. After the publication of Birdy and through the early 1990s, Wharton published eight novels, including Dad and A Midnight Clear, both of which were also made into films. Dad starred Jack Lemmon and Ethan Hawke in one of his first movie roles. Hawke also starred in A Midnight Clear. In 1988, Wharton's daughter, Kate, her husband, Bill, and their two children, two-year-old Dayiel and eight-month-old Mia, were killed in a 23-car motor vehicle accident near Albany, Oregon, caused by smoke generated by grass-burning on nearby farmland. Wharton wrote a (mostly) non-fiction book, Ever After: A Father's True Story (1995), which recounts the incidents leading to the accident, his family's subsequent grief, and the three years which he devoted to pursuing redress in the Oregon court system for the field-burning that caused the accident. Houseboat on the Seine, a memoir, was published in 1996, about Wharton's purchase and renovation of a houseboat. Wharton gained an enormous popularity in Poland, where many extra editions of his books as well as visits followed. Eventually, many of Wharton's works were translated and published exclusively in the Polish language (see the Bibliography).

Wharton died on 29 October 2008 in a hospital in Encinitas, California.

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