American writer of short stories and novels featuring characters who are shaped by the impersonal suburban environments in which they live.

Brother of writer Donald Barthelme (Barthelme, Donald), Frederick attended Tulane University, the University of Houston, and Johns Hopkins University, where he received his M.A. (1977). Rangoon, a collection of his surreal short fiction, drawings, and photographs, was published in 1970. This was soon followed by his novel War & War (1971). With the short stories of Moon Deluxe (1983), written in the present tense and almost all in the first person, he attracted wide notice. The protagonist of his humorous novel Second Marriage (1984) is a man whose second wife kicks him out of their home in order to make room for his first wife. Similarly, his novel Tracer (1985) presents a disheartened male and two women to whom he is attached. His subsequent works include the short-story collection Chroma (1987) and the novels Two Against One (1988), Natural Selection (1990), Painted Desert (1995), Bob the Gambler (1997), and Elroy Nights (2003).