Robert Fulghum Essay - UniversalEssays

Custom Writing Services

This sample Robert Fulghum Essay is published for informational purposes only. Free essays and research papers, are not written by our writers, they are contributed by users, so we are not responsible for the content of this free sample paper. If you want to buy a high quality essay at affordable price please use our custom essay writing service.

Best known for his thought-provoking books All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten: Uncommon Thoughts on Common Things (1988) and It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It (1989), Robert Fulghum’s inspirational works are popular best sellers. Critics have suggested that the themes explored in the author’s essays touch readers with their simplicity, humor, insight, and universal nature. While Fulghum, a former minister, injects a spiritual component into his books, his essays also emphasize the importance of little joys found in everyday life. He touches on the importance of the mundane and highlights the fragile connections that keep people attached to their loved ones and the human community at large.

Works in Biographical and Historical Context

Strict Upbringing

Born June 4,1937, in Waco, Texas, Fulghum was the only child of Lee and Eula (Howard) Fulghum. His alcoholic father was an executive with Sears, Roebuck and Company, and Fulghum was raised in a strict Southern Baptist home on a ranch in Waco. His mother expected him to become a minister. Fulghum’s relationship with his parents, especially his mother, was strained. Feeling rebellious after high school graduation, he embarked on a journey to discover himself and the world around him.

Fulghum first briefly attended the University of Colorado. During the summers, he helped support himself with odd jobs, including stints as a singing cowboy at dude ranches in the American West and as an amateur rodeo performer. He returned home when his father became ill and his parents suffered from financial difficulties. Fulghum then began attending Baylor University. He graduated from Baylor with a degree in history and philosophy in 1957. That same year, he married his college sweetheart, Marcia McClellan, with whom he had three children.

Attended Unitarian Seminary

After a brief stint in iBM’s management training program, in which he realized corporate culture was not for him, Fulghum moved to California. There he attended the Starr King School for the Ministry, a Unitarian seminary, in Berkeley. At the time, Beat poetry and the counterculture revolution were taking hold in California and soon spread to the rest of the country. Both phenomena were subcultures that were disillusioned with mainstream morality and defied it by establishing new aesthetic standards in literary and lifestyle choices.

While a seminary student, Fulghum embraced the look and activities of counterculture. He also supported himselfand his wife by working as a bartender, psychiatric-patient counselor, prison counselor, and painter. Fulghum earned a degree in divinity from Starr King and was ordained to the ministry of the Unitarian Church in 1961.

Life as a Minister

Fulghum then became a part-time minister in Bellingham, Washington, where he and his wife began their family. In 1966, Fulghum moved to another part-time ministry at Edmonds Unitarian Church in Seattle, Washington. While working there, he participated in other activities and held other jobs. For example, he went to Birmingham, Alabama, for a civil rights march to oppose segregation and support basic civil rights for African Americans. By 1971, Fulghum also became an art instructor at the Lakeside School in Seattle, Washington.

While Fulghum’s life was full, there were problems. He and his wife had grown apart, and he considered suicide. Continuing his adventurous streak, Fulghum went to Japan in 1972 to study at a Zen Buddhist monastery. There, he met the woman who would become his second wife, Lynn Edwards. Fulghum divorced his first wife in 1973, then married Edwards in 1975. The couple lived on a houseboat on Seattle’s Lake Union and spent their summers traveling the world.

From Minister to Best-Selling Author

In 1985, Fulghum retired from ministry at Edmonds Unitarian Church and became a minister emeritus there. Three years later, he also left his art instructor position at Lakeside School. Soon, however, he had a new career as an author. During his ministry of more than two decades, Fulghum had jotted down daily insights for use in sermons and church newsletter-articles, essays, and columns.

One of these works in particular had struck a chord. The piece, which focused on the valuable life lessons learned in kindergarten, first sparked interest within the Unitarian community. After being copied and passed around, Fulghum’s work made it beyond the Unitarian circuit and into the mainstream. It was read into the Congressional Record, featured on various radio shows, and reprinted in several major newspapers and magazines. A literary agent came across the essay, and, impressed by the writing, contacted Fulghum. The result was Fulghum’s first book.

Fulghum published All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten: Uncommon Thoughts on Common Things in 1988, and it was an immediate smash best seller. Though critics were underwhelmed, the book won immediate public acclaim and appeared on several bestseller charts.

In 1989, Fulghum published his second best seller, It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It. Like All I Really Need to Know, It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It is a collection of thought-provoking compositions that appealed more to general readers than to critics.

Continued Literary Success

Fulghum continued to produce books on similar themes through the late 1990s. In 1991, he published Uh-Oh: Some Observations from Both Sides of the Refrigerator Door, which offers advice on how to overcome problematic situations that begin with one party uttering the phrase ”uh oh.” While Maybe (Maybe Not): Second Thoughts from a Secret Life (1993) is in the same vein as All I Really Need to Know, From Beginning to End: The Rituals of Our Lives (1995) is more narrowly focused.

In From Beginning to End, Fulghum examines the ways in which human beings create meaning and give structure to their lives through public rituals. He looks at public events such as weddings, funerals, school reunions, and church services. Fulghum includes more information from his own life, and writes about his reunion with the daughter he gave up for adoption in 1958.

Break from Publishing

Fulghum published two books in 1997—True Love: Real Life Stories and Words I Wish I Wrote—then took a decade-long break from writing. In that time, he traveled the world and pursued such new interests as learning how to dance the tango. Fulghum returned to publishing in 2007 with a new collection of essays, What On Earth Have I Done?: Stories, Observations, and Affirmations. As with his previous works, this collection finds meaning in ordinary life and often offers moral lessons. Fulghum continues to live and write in Seattle, but also spends time on the Greek island of Crete.

Works in Literary Context

In his successful collections of vignettes and homilies of everyday life, Fulghum carved out a niche among popular nonfiction writers, emphasizing the beauty and wonder in the ordinary and offering a positive vision of modern existence. Featuring a simple style and much repetition, Fulghum gives readers hopeful messages meant to counter the difficult aspects of the modern world. He also points out reasonable alternatives to the ways people react to life. Fulghum points out the importance of basic human values and commonplace rituals that reveal people’s inherently good natures. Fulghum was influenced in his writings by his varied life experiences, especially the years he spent as a Unitarian minister and related training.

Appreciating and Improving

Everyday Life In his essay collections, Fulghum emphasizes certain basic principles of everyday life. Wanting his readers to enjoy and appreciate their lives, he often invokes simple pleasures as the means of a better way to live. His first book, for example, urges people to approach their everyday existence by living a life as balanced as a day in kindergarten. Other essays in the collection feature Fulghum’s discussion of the real joys associated with transportation and the simple pleasures derived from using crayons. The essays in subsequent books share this overall theme. It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It and Maybe (Maybe Not) look at such subjects as parenting, traveling, joy, sorrow, ironing a shirt, and selling chocolate in similar fashion. Even What on Earth Have I Done? includes such vignettes as a sock-buying trip to a department store to show how to find depth in common tasks.

Humor

While Fulghum uses his essays and their stories to help his readers, he employs humor to enhance their appeal and to underscore the lessons he offers. In All I Really Need to Know, for example, his stories include a bride who vomits on her wedding guests during the ceremony and his observation of a neighbor who walks straight into a spider web and runs away screaming. Fulghum retells the latter experience from the point of view of the small creature that built the web. Another humorous anecdote involves woodsmen who fell trees by yelling at them. The title essay in It Was On Fire When I Lay Down on It focuses on a man in a small town rescued from his smoldering bed by an emergency squad; his response when asked how it happened gives the book its title. Fulghum’s use of humor extended through his later books, including What On Earth Have I Done? In this collection, his humorous anecdotes include dressing like a rabbit while trick-or-treating with his grandchildren and befriending someone who does not speak the same language.

Works in Critical Context

Despite the popularity of Fulghum’s books, they have received little serious critical attention. While some acknowledge the attraction of his simple philosophy, others characterize it as feel-good prose of little real substance. For example, It Was on Fire When I Lay Down on It was deemed by some reviewers as slightly sugarcoated and mundane, while others praised the author’s witty stories, remarking on Fulghum’s valuable insights. Though few would argue his books have real literary merit, they nevertheless have struck a chord with the reading public who have made them classics of modern popular culture.

All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten: Uncommon Thoughts on Common Things

Although the public received the volume with considerable enthusiasm, critics generally reviewed the book with skepticism. Commentators labeled the essays variously as homespun wisdom, inspired observations, and ”philosophical tofu”— a reference to the soybean food product that is trendy, bland, and fairly insubstantial. In a review for the New York Times, Patricia Leigh Brown acknowledges Fulghum’s unabashed sentimentality, noting that ”Robert Fulghum at times can be like drinking five-cent lemonade; it is only after you’ve downed the Dixie Cup that you realize how much sugar is at the bottom.” Ruth Bayard Smith of the New York Times Book Review acknowledges some value in Fulghum’s words. Smith writes, ”To be sure, some of this reads like a cross between Erma Bombeck and Andy Rooney. … Moreover, he makes no claim to intellectual depth; he knows that the appeal of his message lies in its simplicity.” In contrast, Jeff Danziger, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, calls the essays ”extremely well written with a friendly and economical prose.” He concludes, ”Several of the essays will give you the ever-popular lump in the throat.”

Uh-Oh: Some Observations from Both Sides of the Refrigerator Door

In common with All I Really Need to Know, Uh-Oh: Some Observations from Both Sides of the Refrigerator Door received a mixed response from critics. A perceived repetition of style and substance drew a negative response from critics like Andrea Cooper, who wrote in the New York Times Book Review, ”A better editor would have changed that embarrassing title, smoothed the fragmented, ad-copy writing style and encouraged Mr. Fulghum to experiment beyond his predictable format with longer, more substantive reflections.” Martin Brady of Booklist adds, ”Not all of [his message] is pithy … sometimes Fulghum comes across as Andy Rooney crossed with Richard Bach.” Other reviewers found his loosely connected essays refreshing. ”He’s sincere, and his message feels good,” writes People’s Louisa Ermelino. ”Sure, Fulghum is overbearing, oversimplified and saccharine. But he’s also touching, practical, and wise.”

References:

Brady, Martin. Review of Uh-Oh: Some Observations from Both Sides of the Refrigerator Door. Booklist (July 1991): 2009.
Brown, Patricia Leigh. Review of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten: Uncommon Thoughts on Common Things. New York Times (December 21, 1988).
Cooper, Andrea. Review of Uh-Oh: Some Observations from Both Sides of the Refrigerator Door. New York Times Book Review (September 15, 1991): 26.
Danziger, Jeff. Review of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten: Uncommon Thoughts on Common Things. Christian Science Monitor (October 24, 1988): 22.
Ermelino, Louisa. ”From Beginning to End.” People (July 24, 1995): 24.
Smith, Ruth Bayard. Review of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten: Uncommon Thoughts on Common Things. New York Times Book Review (March 19, 1989): 23.