[2] Barthelme won a Scholastic Writing Award in Short Story in 1949, while a student at Lamar High School in Houston.

While at the university, he started up a literary journal called Forum, which published many future "big names", including Norman Mailer, Walker Percy, Marshall McLuhan, and William H.

[2] He spent much of his free time in Houston's Black jazz clubs, listening to musical innovators such as Lionel Hampton and Peck Kelley, an experience that influenced his later writing.

[4] "A Shower of Gold", another early short story, portrays a sculptor who agrees to appear on the existentialist game show Who Am I?.

His style—fictional and popular figures in absurd situations, e.g., the Batman-inspired "The Joker's Greatest Triumph"[a]—spawned a number of imitators and would help to define the next several decades of short fiction.

[page needed] Other notable stories from this collection include "The Indian Uprising", a mad collage of a Comanche attack on a modern city, and "Robert Kennedy Saved From Drowning", a series of vignettes showing the difficulties of truly knowing a public figure.

His other writings have been posthumously gathered into two collections, The Teachings of Don B.: Satires, Parodies, Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme (1992) and Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews (1997).

[6] Barthelme's thoughts and work were largely the result of 20th-century angst[6] as he read extensively, for example in Pascal, Husserl, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Ionesco, Beckett, Sartre, and Camus.

Barthelme's stories typically avoid traditional plot structures, relying instead on a steady accumulation of seemingly unrelated detail.

By subverting the reader's expectations through constant non-sequiturs, Barthelme creates a fragmented verbal collage reminiscent of such modernist works as T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and James Joyce's Ulysses, whose linguistic experiments he often challenged.

However, Barthelme's fundamental skepticism and irony distanced him from the modernists' belief in the power of art to reconstruct society, leading most critics to class him as a postmodernist writer.

Literary critics have noted that Barthelme, like Stéphane Mallarmé, whom he admired, plays with the meanings of words, relying on poetic intuition to spark new connections of ideas buried in the expressions and conventional responses.

[2] In 1964, he began to publish short stories collections beginning with Come Back, Dr. Caligari in 1964, followed by Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968) and City Life (1970).

Time magazine named City Life one of the best books of the year and described the collection as written with "Kafka's purity of language and some of Beckett's grim humor".

His formal originality can be seen in his fresh handling of the parodic dramatic monologue in "The School" or a list of one hundred numbered sentences and fragments in "The Glass Mountain".

Thomas Cobb, one of his students, published his doctoral dissertation Crazy Heart in 1987 partly basing the main character on Barthelme.