William Gaddis
Encyclopedia
William Thomas Gaddis, Jr. (December 29, 1922 – December 16, 1998) was an American novelist. He wrote five novels, two of which won National Book Award
s and one of which, The Recognitions
(his first and longest novel), was chosen as one of TIME magazine's
100 best novels from 1923 to 2005
. A collection of his essays was published posthumously in 2002 in a book titled The Rush for Second Place
.
Gaddis is an important figure in and indeed one of the founding authors of American postmodern literature
. His novels, because of their complexity and inventiveness in structure and style, are often considered challenging and difficult to read; for example, J R
and A Frolic of His Own
, both National Book Award winners, are written almost entirely in dialogue form and without much scene description, sometimes leading to confusion as to which character is speaking. Jonathan Franzen
dubbed Gaddis as 'Mr. Difficult', stating that "by a comfortable margin, the most difficult book I ever voluntarily read in its entirety was Gaddis' nine-hundred-and-fifty-six-page first novel, The Recognitions." His books are also known for the extensive usage of literary and cultural allusions, some of which are annotated in the freely available online archive The Gaddis Annotations compiled by Steven Moore, an authority on Gaddis' novels.
to William Thomas Gaddis, who worked "on Wall Street
and in politics", and Edith Gaddis, an executive for the New York Steam Corporation. When he was 3, his parents separated and Gaddis was subsequently raised by his mother in Massapequa, Long Island
. At age 5 he was sent to Merricourt Boarding School in Berlin
, Connecticut
. He continued in private school until the eighth grade, after which he returned to Long Island. He lived with an Aunt in Farmingdale who became overprotective due to Williams "severe lung troubles." Friends including Arvid Friberg Jr. and Bill Park often found ways to get William out of the house to enjoy racing, drinking, and other escapades. He received his diploma at Farmingdale High School in 1941. He entered Harvard in 1941 and famously wrote for the Harvard Lampoon
(where he eventually served as President), but was asked to leave in 1944, supposedly because of a drunken brawl, though the circumstances are unclear. The circumstances of his departure from Harvard were in response to his depositing the Deans car into a pond. He worked as a fact checker
for The New Yorker
for little over a year (late February 1945 until late April 1946), then spent five years traveling in Mexico
, Central America
, Spain, France, England, and North Africa
. During this time he worked on one of the locks on the Panama Canal. He always claimed it was a great place to write. He returned to the United States in 1951.
His first novel, The Recognitions, appeared in 1955. A lengthy, complex, and allusive work, it had to wait to find its audience. Newspaper reviewers considered it overly intellectual, overwritten, and perhaps on the principle of ("all that is unknown appears obscene"), filthy. (The book was defended by Jack Green
in a series of broadsheets blasting the critics; the series was collected later under the title Fire the Bastards!
) Shortly after the publication of The Recognitions, Gaddis married his first wife, Patricia Black, who would give birth to two children: Sarah (who has written a novel, Swallow Hard, inspired by her relationship with her father) and Matthew.
Gaddis then turned to public relations
work and the making of documentary films to support himself and his family. In this role he worked for Pfizer
, Eastman Kodak
, IBM
, and the United States Army
, among others. He also received a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant, a Rockefeller grant
, and two National Endowment for the Arts
grants, all of which helped him write his second novel. In 1975 he published J R
, a work even more difficult than The Recognitions, told almost entirely in dialogue, where it is sometimes difficult to determine which character is speaking. Its eponymous protagonist, an 11-year-old, learns enough about the stock market from a class field trip to build a financial empire of his own. Critical opinion had caught up with him, and the book won the National Book Award for Fiction. His marriage to his second wife, Judith Thompson, dissolved shortly after J R was published. By the late 1970s, Gaddis had entered into a relationship with Muriel Oxenberg Murphy, and they lived together until the mid-1990s.
Carpenter's Gothic
(1985) offered a shorter and more accessible picture of Gaddis's sardonic worldview. Instead of struggling against misanthropy (as in The Recognitions) or reluctantly giving ground to it (as in JR), Carpenter's Gothic wallows in it. The continual litigation that was a theme in that book becomes the central theme and plot device in A Frolic of His Own
(1994)—which earned him his second National Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction—where it seems that everyone is suing someone. There is even a Japanese car called the Sosumi. (Gaddis has never been afraid of the pun. There is a character in The Recognitions named Recktall Brown.)
Gaddis died at home in East Hampton, New York
, of prostate cancer on December 16, 1998, but not before creating his final work, Agapē Agape
(the first word of the title is the Greek agapē
, meaning divine, unconditional love), which was published in 2002, a novella in the form of the last words of a character similar but not identical to his creator. The Rush for Second Place
, published at the same time, collected most of Gaddis's previously published nonfiction.
After years of critical neglect, Gaddis is now often acknowledged as being one of the greatest of American post-war novelists. A critic who early on appreciated his work and recognized its value is Steven Moore
: in 1982 he published A Reader's Guide to William Gaddis's "The Recognitions" and in 1989 a monograph on Gaddis in the Twayne series. Gaddis's influence is vast (although frequently subterranean): for example, postmodern authors such as Don DeLillo
and Thomas Pynchon
seem to have been influenced by Gaddis (indeed, upon publication of V.
, Pynchon was actually speculated to have been a pen name for Gaddis due to the similarity of styles and the dearth of information about the two authors; the Wanda Tinasky
letters also claimed that Gaddis, Pynchon, and Jack Green were the same person), as well as authors such as Joseph McElroy
, William Gass, David Markson
, and David Foster Wallace
, who have all stated their admiration for Gaddis in general and The Recognitions in particular.
His life and work are the subject of a comprehensive website, The Gaddis Annotations, which has been noted in at least one academic journal as a superior example of scholarship using new media
resources. Gaddis's papers are collected at Washington University in St. Louis
.
's 1952 novel Who Walk in Darkness, "Harold Sand" in Jack Kerouac
's autobiographical 1958 novella The Subterraneans
and possibly "Bill Gray" in Don DeLillo
's 1991 novel Mao II
. (DeLillo was a friend of Gaddis.) The characters "Richard Whitehurst" in Kurt Wenzel's Lit Life: A Novel (2001) and "Joshua Gel" in Stephen Dixon's I: A Novel (2002) likely are based on Gaddis. Authors clearly influenced by Gaddis include Jonathan Franzen
(The Corrections
), David Markson
(Epitaph for a Tramp), Joseph McElroy
(A Smuggler's Bible) and Stanley Elkin
(The Magic Kingdom).
National Book Award
The National Book Awards are a set of American literary awards. Started in 1950, the Awards are presented annually to American authors for literature published in the current year. In 1989 the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization which now oversees and manages the National Book...
s and one of which, The Recognitions
The Recognitions
The Recognitions, published in 1955, is American author William Gaddis's first novel. The novel was poorly received initially, but Gaddis's reputation grew, twenty years later, with the publication of his second novel J R , and The Recognitions received belated fame as a masterpiece of American...
(his first and longest novel), was chosen as one of TIME magazine's
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
100 best novels from 1923 to 2005
TIME's List of the 100 Best Novels
Times List of the 100 Best Novels, is an unranked list of the 100 best novels—and 10 best graphic novels—published in the English language between 1923 and 2005. The list was compiled by Time critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo....
. A collection of his essays was published posthumously in 2002 in a book titled The Rush for Second Place
The Rush for Second Place
The Rush for Second Place is a posthumous collection of essays by William Gaddis. Edited and introduced by Joseph Tabbi, it was published in 2002 by Penguin Press at the same time as Gaddis's last novel, Agapē Agape. The contents were published in Great Britain with Agapē Agape as Agapē Agape and...
.
Gaddis is an important figure in and indeed one of the founding authors of American postmodern literature
Postmodern literature
The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain characteristics of post–World War II literature and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature.Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is hard to define and there is little agreement on the exact...
. His novels, because of their complexity and inventiveness in structure and style, are often considered challenging and difficult to read; for example, J R
J R
J R is a novel by William Gaddis. Published in 1975 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., J R was Gaddis's second novel and received the National Book Award in 1976....
and A Frolic of His Own
A Frolic of His Own
A Frolic of His Own is a novel by William Gaddis. Published in 1994 by Poseidon Press, A Frolic of His Own was Gaddis's fourth novel. It received the American Book Award and the National Book Award in 1994....
, both National Book Award winners, are written almost entirely in dialogue form and without much scene description, sometimes leading to confusion as to which character is speaking. Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. His third novel, The Corrections , a sprawling, satirical family drama, drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction...
dubbed Gaddis as 'Mr. Difficult', stating that "by a comfortable margin, the most difficult book I ever voluntarily read in its entirety was Gaddis' nine-hundred-and-fifty-six-page first novel, The Recognitions." His books are also known for the extensive usage of literary and cultural allusions, some of which are annotated in the freely available online archive The Gaddis Annotations compiled by Steven Moore, an authority on Gaddis' novels.
Biography
Gaddis was born in New York CityNew York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
to William Thomas Gaddis, who worked "on Wall Street
Wall Street
Wall Street refers to the financial district of New York City, named after and centered on the eight-block-long street running from Broadway to South Street on the East River in Lower Manhattan. Over time, the term has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, or...
and in politics", and Edith Gaddis, an executive for the New York Steam Corporation. When he was 3, his parents separated and Gaddis was subsequently raised by his mother in Massapequa, Long Island
Long Island
Long Island is an island located in the southeast part of the U.S. state of New York, just east of Manhattan. Stretching northeast into the Atlantic Ocean, Long Island contains four counties, two of which are boroughs of New York City , and two of which are mainly suburban...
. At age 5 he was sent to Merricourt Boarding School in Berlin
Berlin, Connecticut
Berlin is a town in Hartford County, Connecticut, United States. The population was 19,866 at the 2010 census. It was incorporated in 1785. The geographic center of Connecticut is located in the town. Berlin is residential and industrial, and served by the Amtrak station of the same name...
, Connecticut
Connecticut
Connecticut is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Rhode Island to the east, Massachusetts to the north, and the state of New York to the west and the south .Connecticut is named for the Connecticut River, the major U.S. river that approximately...
. He continued in private school until the eighth grade, after which he returned to Long Island. He lived with an Aunt in Farmingdale who became overprotective due to Williams "severe lung troubles." Friends including Arvid Friberg Jr. and Bill Park often found ways to get William out of the house to enjoy racing, drinking, and other escapades. He received his diploma at Farmingdale High School in 1941. He entered Harvard in 1941 and famously wrote for the Harvard Lampoon
Harvard Lampoon
The Harvard Lampoon is an undergraduate humor publication founded in 1876 at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.-Overview:Published since 1876, The Harvard Lampoon is the world's longest continually published humor magazine. It is also the second longest-running English-language humor...
(where he eventually served as President), but was asked to leave in 1944, supposedly because of a drunken brawl, though the circumstances are unclear. The circumstances of his departure from Harvard were in response to his depositing the Deans car into a pond. He worked as a fact checker
Fact checker
A fact checker is the person who checks factual assertions in non-fictional text, usually intended for publication in a periodical, to determine their veracity and correctness...
for The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
for little over a year (late February 1945 until late April 1946), then spent five years traveling in Mexico
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
, Central America
Central America
Central America is the central geographic region of the Americas. It is the southernmost, isthmian portion of the North American continent, which connects with South America on the southeast. When considered part of the unified continental model, it is considered a subcontinent...
, Spain, France, England, and North Africa
North Africa
North Africa or Northern Africa is the northernmost region of the African continent, linked by the Sahara to Sub-Saharan Africa. Geopolitically, the United Nations definition of Northern Africa includes eight countries or territories; Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, South Sudan, Sudan, Tunisia, and...
. During this time he worked on one of the locks on the Panama Canal. He always claimed it was a great place to write. He returned to the United States in 1951.
His first novel, The Recognitions, appeared in 1955. A lengthy, complex, and allusive work, it had to wait to find its audience. Newspaper reviewers considered it overly intellectual, overwritten, and perhaps on the principle of ("all that is unknown appears obscene"), filthy. (The book was defended by Jack Green
Jack Green (critic)
jack green is the pseudonym for Christopher Carlisle Reid , a literary critic who was a great defender of the work of William Gaddis. Reid—who took the name from a racing form after he quit his job to become a freelance critic—particularly admired Gaddis' 1955 novel The Recognitions, which...
in a series of broadsheets blasting the critics; the series was collected later under the title Fire the Bastards!
Fire the Bastards!
Fire the Bastards! was written by Jack Green and published in his magazine newspaper in 1962. It was an acerbic critique of the book reviewing industry....
) Shortly after the publication of The Recognitions, Gaddis married his first wife, Patricia Black, who would give birth to two children: Sarah (who has written a novel, Swallow Hard, inspired by her relationship with her father) and Matthew.
Gaddis then turned to public relations
Public relations
Public relations is the actions of a corporation, store, government, individual, etc., in promoting goodwill between itself and the public, the community, employees, customers, etc....
work and the making of documentary films to support himself and his family. In this role he worked for Pfizer
Pfizer
Pfizer, Inc. is an American multinational pharmaceutical corporation. The company is based in New York City, New York with its research headquarters in Groton, Connecticut, United States...
, Eastman Kodak
Eastman Kodak
Eastman Kodak Company is a multinational imaging and photographic equipment, materials and services company headquarted in Rochester, New York, United States. It was founded by George Eastman in 1892....
, IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
, and the United States Army
United States Army
The United States Army is the main branch of the United States Armed Forces responsible for land-based military operations. It is the largest and oldest established branch of the U.S. military, and is one of seven U.S. uniformed services...
, among others. He also received a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant, a Rockefeller grant
Rockefeller Foundation
The Rockefeller Foundation is a prominent philanthropic organization and private foundation based at 420 Fifth Avenue, New York City. The preeminent institution established by the six-generation Rockefeller family, it was founded by John D. Rockefeller , along with his son John D. Rockefeller, Jr...
, and two National Endowment for the Arts
National Endowment for the Arts
The National Endowment for the Arts is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. Its current...
grants, all of which helped him write his second novel. In 1975 he published J R
J R
J R is a novel by William Gaddis. Published in 1975 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., J R was Gaddis's second novel and received the National Book Award in 1976....
, a work even more difficult than The Recognitions, told almost entirely in dialogue, where it is sometimes difficult to determine which character is speaking. Its eponymous protagonist, an 11-year-old, learns enough about the stock market from a class field trip to build a financial empire of his own. Critical opinion had caught up with him, and the book won the National Book Award for Fiction. His marriage to his second wife, Judith Thompson, dissolved shortly after J R was published. By the late 1970s, Gaddis had entered into a relationship with Muriel Oxenberg Murphy, and they lived together until the mid-1990s.
Carpenter's Gothic
Carpenter's Gothic
Carpenter's Gothic is the title of the third novel by William Gaddis, published in 1985 by Viking. The title connotes a "Gothic" tale of haunted isolation, in a milieu stripped of all pretensions....
(1985) offered a shorter and more accessible picture of Gaddis's sardonic worldview. Instead of struggling against misanthropy (as in The Recognitions) or reluctantly giving ground to it (as in JR), Carpenter's Gothic wallows in it. The continual litigation that was a theme in that book becomes the central theme and plot device in A Frolic of His Own
A Frolic of His Own
A Frolic of His Own is a novel by William Gaddis. Published in 1994 by Poseidon Press, A Frolic of His Own was Gaddis's fourth novel. It received the American Book Award and the National Book Award in 1994....
(1994)—which earned him his second National Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction—where it seems that everyone is suing someone. There is even a Japanese car called the Sosumi. (Gaddis has never been afraid of the pun. There is a character in The Recognitions named Recktall Brown.)
Gaddis died at home in East Hampton, New York
East Hampton (town), New York
The Town of East Hampton is located in southeastern Suffolk County, New York, at the eastern end of the South Shore of Long Island. It is the easternmost town in the state of New York...
, of prostate cancer on December 16, 1998, but not before creating his final work, Agapē Agape
Agape Agape
Agapē Agape is a novel by William Gaddis. Published posthumously in 2002 by Viking with an afterword by Joseph Tabbi, Agapē Agape was Gaddis' fifth and final novel...
(the first word of the title is the Greek agapē
Agape
Agape is one of the Greek words translated into English as love, one which became particularly appropriated in Christian theology as the love of God or Christ for mankind. In the New Testament, it refers to the fatherly love of God for humans, as well as the human reciprocal love for God; the term...
, meaning divine, unconditional love), which was published in 2002, a novella in the form of the last words of a character similar but not identical to his creator. The Rush for Second Place
The Rush for Second Place
The Rush for Second Place is a posthumous collection of essays by William Gaddis. Edited and introduced by Joseph Tabbi, it was published in 2002 by Penguin Press at the same time as Gaddis's last novel, Agapē Agape. The contents were published in Great Britain with Agapē Agape as Agapē Agape and...
, published at the same time, collected most of Gaddis's previously published nonfiction.
After years of critical neglect, Gaddis is now often acknowledged as being one of the greatest of American post-war novelists. A critic who early on appreciated his work and recognized its value is Steven Moore
Steven Moore (US author)
Steven Moore is an American author and literary critic. Best known as an authority on the novels of William Gaddis, he published the first volume of his major work The Novel: An Alternative History in April 2010.-Biography/Career:...
: in 1982 he published A Reader's Guide to William Gaddis's "The Recognitions" and in 1989 a monograph on Gaddis in the Twayne series. Gaddis's influence is vast (although frequently subterranean): for example, postmodern authors such as Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo is an American author, playwright, and occasional essayist whose work paints a detailed portrait of American life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries...
and Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...
seem to have been influenced by Gaddis (indeed, upon publication of V.
V.
V. is the debut novel of Thomas Pynchon, published in 1963. It describes the exploits of a discharged U.S. Navy sailor named Benny Profane, his reconnection in New York with a group of pseudo-bohemian artists and hangers-on known as the Whole Sick Crew, and the quest of an aging traveller named...
, Pynchon was actually speculated to have been a pen name for Gaddis due to the similarity of styles and the dearth of information about the two authors; the Wanda Tinasky
Wanda Tinasky
Wanda Tinasky, ostensibly a bag lady living under a bridge in the Mendocino County area of Northern California, was the pseudonymous author of a series of playful, comic and erudite letters sent to the Mendocino Commentary and Anderson Valley Advertiser between 1983 and 1988. These letters were...
letters also claimed that Gaddis, Pynchon, and Jack Green were the same person), as well as authors such as Joseph McElroy
Joseph McElroy
Joseph McElroy is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist.McElroy grew up in Brooklyn Heights, NY, a neighborhood that features prominently in much of his fiction. He received his B.A. from Williams College in 1951 and his M.A. from Columbia University in 1952...
, William Gass, David Markson
David Markson
David Markson was an American novelist, born David Merrill Markson in Albany, New York. He is the author of several postmodern novels, including Springer's Progress, Wittgenstein's Mistress, and Reader's Block...
, and David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace was an American author of novels, essays, and short stories, and a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California...
, who have all stated their admiration for Gaddis in general and The Recognitions in particular.
His life and work are the subject of a comprehensive website, The Gaddis Annotations, which has been noted in at least one academic journal as a superior example of scholarship using new media
New media
New media is a broad term in media studies that emerged in the latter part of the 20th century. For example, new media holds out a possibility of on-demand access to content any time, anywhere, on any digital device, as well as interactive user feedback, creative participation and community...
resources. Gaddis's papers are collected at Washington University in St. Louis
Washington University in St. Louis
Washington University in St. Louis is a private research university located in suburban St. Louis, Missouri. Founded in 1853, and named for George Washington, the university has students and faculty from all fifty U.S. states and more than 110 nations...
.
Awards
Gaddis has received the following awards and honorary positions:- The MacArthur FoundationMacArthur FoundationThe John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is one of the largest private foundations in the United States. Based in Chicago but supporting non-profit organizations that work in 60 countries, MacArthur has awarded more than US$4 billion since its inception in 1978...
’s "Genius Award" (1982); - Election to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1989);
- The Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement (1993).
Legacy & Influence
Characters based on Gaddis include "Harry Lees" in Chandler BrossardChandler Brossard
Chandler Brossard was an American novelist, writer, editor, and teacher.He was born in Idaho Falls, Idaho, and grew up in Washington, D.C. Brossard was chiefly self-educated, having left school at age eleven...
's 1952 novel Who Walk in Darkness, "Harold Sand" in Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac
Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...
's autobiographical 1958 novella The Subterraneans
The Subterraneans
The Subterraneans is a 1958 novella by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. It is a semi-fictional account of his short romance with an African American woman named Alene Lee in San Francisco in 1953. In the novel she is renamed "Mardou Fox," and described as a carefree spirit who frequents the...
and possibly "Bill Gray" in Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo is an American author, playwright, and occasional essayist whose work paints a detailed portrait of American life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries...
's 1991 novel Mao II
Mao II
Mao II, published in 1991, is Don DeLillo's tenth novel. It was the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1992. The title is derived from a series of Andy Warhol silkscreen prints depicting Mao Zedong. This book was dedicated to DeLillo's editor, Gordon Lish.-Plot summary:A reclusive novelist...
. (DeLillo was a friend of Gaddis.) The characters "Richard Whitehurst" in Kurt Wenzel's Lit Life: A Novel (2001) and "Joshua Gel" in Stephen Dixon's I: A Novel (2002) likely are based on Gaddis. Authors clearly influenced by Gaddis include Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen
Jonathan Franzen is an American novelist and essayist. His third novel, The Corrections , a sprawling, satirical family drama, drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction...
(The Corrections
The Corrections
The Corrections is a 2001 novel by American author Jonathan Franzen. It revolves around the troubles of an elderly Midwestern couple and their three adult children, tracing their lives from the mid-twentieth century to "one last Christmas" together near the turn of the millennium...
), David Markson
David Markson
David Markson was an American novelist, born David Merrill Markson in Albany, New York. He is the author of several postmodern novels, including Springer's Progress, Wittgenstein's Mistress, and Reader's Block...
(Epitaph for a Tramp), Joseph McElroy
Joseph McElroy
Joseph McElroy is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist.McElroy grew up in Brooklyn Heights, NY, a neighborhood that features prominently in much of his fiction. He received his B.A. from Williams College in 1951 and his M.A. from Columbia University in 1952...
(A Smuggler's Bible) and Stanley Elkin
Stanley Elkin
Stanley Lawrence Elkin was a Jewish American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. His extravagant, satirical fiction revolves around American consumerism, popular culture, and male-female relationships.-Biography:...
(The Magic Kingdom).
Fiction
- The RecognitionsThe RecognitionsThe Recognitions, published in 1955, is American author William Gaddis's first novel. The novel was poorly received initially, but Gaddis's reputation grew, twenty years later, with the publication of his second novel J R , and The Recognitions received belated fame as a masterpiece of American...
(19551955 in literatureThe year 1955 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*28 May - Philip Larkin makes a train journey from Hull to London which inspires his poem The Whitsun Weddings....
) - J RJ RJ R is a novel by William Gaddis. Published in 1975 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., J R was Gaddis's second novel and received the National Book Award in 1976....
(19751975 in literatureThe year 1975 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* August 12 — with the 20-year time limit stipulated by Thomas Mann at his death having expired, sealed packets containing 32 of the author's notebooks were opened in Zurich, Switzerland.* Writing under the...
) - Carpenter's GothicCarpenter's GothicCarpenter's Gothic is the title of the third novel by William Gaddis, published in 1985 by Viking. The title connotes a "Gothic" tale of haunted isolation, in a milieu stripped of all pretensions....
(19851985 in literatureThe year 1985 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-New books:*Isaac Asimov - Robots and Empire*Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid's Tale*Jean M. Auel - The Mammoth Hunters*Iain Banks - Walking on Glass...
) - A Frolic of His OwnA Frolic of His OwnA Frolic of His Own is a novel by William Gaddis. Published in 1994 by Poseidon Press, A Frolic of His Own was Gaddis's fourth novel. It received the American Book Award and the National Book Award in 1994....
(19941994 in literatureThe year 1994 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-New books:*Kevin J. Anderson - Champions of the Force, Dark Apprentice and Jedi Search*Reed Arvin - The Wind in the Wheat*Greg Bear - Songs of Earth and Power...
) - Agapē AgapeAgape AgapeAgapē Agape is a novel by William Gaddis. Published posthumously in 2002 by Viking with an afterword by Joseph Tabbi, Agapē Agape was Gaddis' fifth and final novel...
(completed 19981998 in literatureThe year 1998 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*March 5 - Tennessee Williams' 1938 play, Not About Nightingales, receives its stage première....
, published 2002)
External links
- The Gaddis Annotations, a comprehensive scholarly site
- The William Gaddis papers at Washington University in St. Louis
- The William Gaddis pages at The Modern Word website