As a 5-year-old growing up in Germany, Ursula Hegi '78, '79G wished she could be invisible, so she could "hear and see everything" going on around her. In adulthood she has achieved perhaps the closest thing to that fantasy that life allows.

Hegi has written an acclaimed series of novels set in the fictional German village of Burgdorf, not far from her native Duesseldorf. And she can "hear and see everything" that happens in the town, because she has created it from her imagination and painstaking research.

Critics have praised all four of the novels in the Burgdorf Cycle—Floating in My Mother's Palm, Stones From the River, The Vision of Emma Blau, and the new Children and Fire (Scribner 2011). Hegi's popularity soared after Oprah Winfrey chose Stones from the River for Oprah's Book Club. The novel became a No. 1 national bestseller and, along with her other books, has helped her win more than 30 grants and awards. Her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Hegi's success has allowed her to continue to write about the subjects that interest her most, which include the weight of history on people with limited power to influence it. In Children and Fire, she filters a complex question through the life of a devoted teacher at a pre-World War II boys' school: What price do we pay for the moral compromises we make to reach cherished goals? Thekla Jansen persuades herself that she is right to support her students' membership in a Hitler Youth group because their participation will bring benefits, such as admission to better schools. But her view begins to change when tragedy strikes her village. Thekla realizes that she hasn't warned her students about the dangers of the Nazis, and wonders if it's too late to make up for having withheld important information. Hegi explores her young teacher's plight in a rich cultural context born of deep research that included riding a horse-drawn cart across tidal flats on the Nordstrand peninsula.

Much of Hegi's fiction has a taproot in a novel set in Germany called The Woman Who Would Not Speak, which she wrote at UNH. That book impressed English professor John Yount enough to send the manuscript to his literary agent.

"It's still unpublished, but it's fed four of my other novels," Hegi says. "There are elements of that novel that are very alive in other books."

Hegi teaches at Stony Brook University, near her Long Island home, where her study faces an inlet that allows her to pursue a passion for kayaking. She's writing a fifth Burgdorf Cycle novel that involves a midwife from Children and Fire, and the book ultimately may surprise her as much as her readers. "When I write, I don't know the ending," Hegi says, "because if I knew that, I wouldn't have to write."

John Irving '65 is "the patriarch of American fiction," a critic for one of England's most prestigious newspapers wrote recently. That view might surprise fans of Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo--not to mention, anyone who sees the field as a vibrant matriarchy led by Toni Morrison and Joyce Carol Oates.

But consider the evidence. Irving won a National Book Award for his best-known novel, The World According to Garp, and an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for his script of The Cider House Rules. He appears regularly on lists of favorites for the Nobel Prize in literature, which often goes to a writer whose work reflects a concern for human rights. And perhaps no living American novelist has shown a more passionate interest in victims of social injustice, ranging from vulnerable women in Garp and The Cider House Rules to casualties of the Vietnam War in A Prayer for Owen Meany.

In his 13th novel, In One Person (Simon & Schuster, 2012), Irving takes aim at a half-century of prejudices against people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered or questioning their sexual identity. He tells his story in the voice of Billy Abbott, a bisexual writer looking back on his childhood in Vermont and on his struggle for self-acceptance in the five decades that have followed. As a teenager, Billy develops "dangerous crushes" on people--his stepfather, an older transgendered woman, a member of his prep school's wrestling team. At first confused by his desires, he begins to understand their deeper implications after he moves to New York and sees others confront realities like AIDS and gender-reassignment surgery. Billy realizes that he and his New England friends grew up "full of self-hatred for our sexual differences, because we'd had it drummed into our heads that those differences were wrong." As he approaches old age, the question becomes: After years of pain, does he have enough time left to make peace with ghosts that still haunt him?

Irving writes about all of this with an intimacy that caused a reporter for "Entertainment Weekly" to wonder whether his stories sprang from his own early life, which included attending Phillips Exeter Academy. "Was I ever gay or bi?" Irving replied. "No, but did I ever have unwelcome and sort of gripping crushes on the older boys, like probably half of the people who went to all-boy schools? Sure I did."

If Irving writes about experiences he didn't have, he doesn't exploit the suffering of others. Perhaps the greatest achievement of In One Person is that for all its wealth of sexual detail, it never turns voyeuristic. The novel has a panoramic sweep but a simple theme rooted in a remark that a transgendered woman makes to Billy when she believes he may be stereotyping her: "My dear boy, please don't put a label on me--don't make me a category before you get to know me!" Irving makes such a forceful case against easy labels that you sense he might resist--even though it is intended as a high compliment--the honor of being "the patriarch of American fiction." ~