Buechner ’ s work has often been praised for its ability to inspire readers to see the grace in their daily lives.

In addition, Buechner has been the recipient of the O. Henry Award, the Rosenthal Award, the Christianity and Literature Belles Lettres Prize, and has been recognized by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Buechner's combination of literary style with approachable, universally applicable subject matter has, to many of his fans, revolutionized contemporary Christian literature: " In my view, Buechner is doing a distinctively new thing on the literary scene, writing novels that are theologically exciting without becoming propaganda, and doing theology with artistic style and imagination.

::" Ever since the publication of A Long Day's Dying ... Frederick Buechner has one of our most interesting and least predictable writers.

The Buechner Institute sponsors convocations on most Mondays at 10: 30 a. m. in Memorial Chapel on the campus of King College that feature speakers from a variety of backgrounds who examine the ways in which faith informs art and public life and cultivate conversation about what faith has to do with books, politics, social discourse, music, visual arts, and more.

His later novels, including the Book of Bebb series and Godric, received hearty praise ; in his 1980 review of Godric, Benjamin DeMott summed up a host of positive reviews, saying “ All on his own, Mr. Buechner has managed to reinvent projects of self-purification and of faith as piquant matter for contemporary fiction, producing in a single decade a quintet of books each of which is individual in concerns and knowledge, and notable for literary finish .” In 1982, author Reynolds Price greeted Buechner ’ s The Sacred Journey as “ a rich new vein for Buechner – a kind of detective autobiography ” and “ he result is a short but fascinating and, in its own terms, beautifully successful experiment .”

Buechner has occasionally been accused of being too “ preachy ;” a 1984 review by Anna Shapiro in the New York Times notes “ But for all the colloquialism, there is something, well, preachy and a little unctuous about making yourself an exemplar of faith.

Buechner has also played literary critic himself.

The Buechner Institute sponsors convocations on most Mondays at 10: 30 a. m. that feature speakers from a variety of backgrounds to examine the ways in which faith informs art and public life and cultivate conversation about what faith has to do with books, politics, social discourse, music, visual arts, and more.

By examining the day-to-day workings of his own life, Buechner seeks to find God's hand at work, thus leading his audience by example to similar introspection.

Insights that would do for a paragraph are dragged out with a doggedness that will presumably bring the idea home to even the most resistant and inattentive .” The sentiments expressed by Cecelia Holland ’ s 1987 Washington Post review of Buechner ’ s novel, Brendan, are far more common.

He is best known for his works A Long Day ’ s Dying ( his first work, published in 1950 ); The Book of Bebb, a tetralogy based on the character Leo Bebb published in 1979 ; Godric, a first person narrative of the life of the medieval saint, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 ; Brendan, a second novel narrating a saint ’ s life, published in 1987 ; Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner ( 1992 ); and his autobiographical works The Sacred Journey ( 1982 ), Now and Then ( 1983 ), Telling Secrets ( 1991 ), and The Eyes of the Heart: Memoirs of the Lost and Found ( 1999 ).

During his senior year at Princeton, Buechner received the Irene Glascock Prize for poetry, and he also began working on his first novel and one of his greatest critical successes: A Long Day ’ s Dying, published in 1950.

However, his second novel, The Season ’ s Difference, published in 1952, in Buechner ’ s words, " fared as badly as the first one had fared well.

In 1952, Buechner began lecturing at New York University, and once again received critical acclaim for his short story " The Tiger ," published in The New Yorker, which won the O. Henry Award in 1955.

For the school year 1963-4, the Buechners took a sabbatical on their farm in Rupert, VT, during which time Buechner returned to his writing ; his fourth book, The Final Beast, was published in 1965.

* 1992 Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner published

Godric ( ISBN 0-06-061162-6 ) is a novel published in 1981, written by Frederick Buechner, that tells the semi-fictionalised life story of medieval Catholic saint Godric of Finchale.

In a long and distinguished career, A Long Day ’ s Dying continues to be one of Buechner ’ s most successful works, both critically and commercially ( it was reissued in 2003 ).

The Book of Bebb tetralogy proved to be one of Buechner ’ s most well-known works.

Buechner ’ s largest presence in the media, however, is through the hundreds of readers who quote his works on a daily basis in articles, blogs, and speeches.

Buechner oversaw a major transformation in the way the museum displayed art and brought some one thousand works that had been languishing in the museum's archives and put them on display.

Buechner answered the question " Do you envision a particular audience when you write?

* 1955-6 year off from seminary to write ; meets and marries Judith Buechner

On Taylor's 1998 release, John Wayne ( album ) he credits more influences ; Flannery O ' Connor, Dennis Prager and Frederick Buechner.

Buechner recalls of his accomplishments at Exeter: " All told, we were there for nine years with one year ’ s leave of absence tucked in the middle, and by the time we left, the religion department had grown from only one full-time teacher, namely myself, and about twenty students, to four teachers and something in the neighborhood, as I remember, of three hundred students or more.

Here the intimate relationship Buechner sees among fiction, theology, and autobiography is first made clear and fully embodied ; and the book itself is a thoroughly lyrical piece.

Of this first book Buechner says,

As the first book he had written since being ordained, The Final Beast represented a new style for Buechner, one in which he combined his dual callings as minister and as author.

" Among these students was the future author John Irving, who included a quotation from Buechner in the preface of his book A Prayer for Owen Meany.

Published in the years from 1972 – 1977, it brought Buechner to a much wider audience, and gained him critical acclaim ( Lion Country, the first book in the series, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1971 ).

In 1980 Buechner reviewed Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth by J. R. R. Tolkien, noting that the book was “ in short, a production less of Tolkien himself than of the Tolkien industry .”

Buechner was a retired colonel with the U. S. Army who served in World War II and had written a book about the Dachau massacre.

* Godric ( novel ), a Pulitzer-nominated book by Frederick Buechner

Some of the historical themes Buechner masterfully envisions in the book include blood libels, pilgrimage, Christian asceticism, hagiography, traveling court culture, Norman and Saxon relations.

Frederick Buechner, the eldest son of Carl Frederick and Katherine ( Kuhn ) Buechner, was born on July 11, 1926 in New York City.

In The Sacred Journey Buechner recalls: " Virtually every year of my life until I was fourteen, I lived in a different place, had different people to take care of me, went to a different school.

Buechner ’ s dense, reflective style was compared to Henry James and Marcel Proust, and he was hailed as one of the rising stars of American literature.

" The contrast between the success of his first novel and the commercial failure of the second was starkly visible, and it was on this note that Buechner left his teaching position at Lawrenceville to move to New York City and focus on his writing career.

It was during one of Buttrick ’ s sermons that Buechner heard the words that inspired his ordination: Buttrick described the inward coronation of Christ as taking place in the hearts of those who believe in him " among confession, and tears, and great laughter.

" The impact of this phrase on Buechner was so great that he eventually entered the Union Theological Seminary in 1954, on a Rockefeller Brothers Theological Fellowship.

Buechner was ordained as an evangelist, or minister without pastoral charge.

His predecessors in this role were none other than Richard Niebuhr and George Buttrick, and Buechner was both flattered and daunted by the idea of joining so august a group.

It was about this time, when Buechner was giving the Noble Lectures, that he came across the character that proved so significant in his later career:

Of writing the series, Buechner says: " I had never known a man like Leo Bebb and was in most ways quite unlike him myself, but despite that, there was very little I had to do by way of consciously, purposefully inventing him.

In 2007, Buechner was presented with the lifetime achievement award from the Conference on Christianity and Literature.

A summer symposium on the work of Frederick Buechner was featured in 2010.

Bernhart presented Buechner with the log from this expedition as well as pictures of the objects recovered, claiming that after the Spear of Destiny was recovered, it was hidden somewhere in Europe by a Nazi secret society.