William Gaddis


William Thomas Gaddis, Jr. was an American novelist.
The first and longest of his five novels, The Recognitions, was named one of TIME magazine's 100 best novels from 1923 to 2005
and two others, J R and A Frolic of His Own, won the annual U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
A collection of his essays was published posthumously as The Rush for Second Place. The Letters of William Gaddis was published by Dalkey Archive Press in February 2013.
Gaddis is widely considered one of the first and most important American postmodern writers.

Life and career

Gaddis was born in New York City to William Thomas Gaddis, who worked "on Wall Street and in politics", and Edith Gaddis, who worked her way up from being secretary to the president of the New York Steam Corporation to an executive position as its chief purchasing agent. When he was three, 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 to receive his diploma at Farmingdale High School in 1941. He entered Harvard in 1941 where he was a member of the Harvard Lampoon, but was asked to leave in 1944 due to an altercation with police. He worked as a fact checker for The New Yorker for little over a year, then spent five years traveling in Mexico, Central America, Spain, France, England, and North Africa, returning 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 omne ignotum per obscaenum, filthy. Shortly after the publication of The Recognitions, Gaddis married his first wife, Patricia Black, who would give birth to two children: Sarah 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,
told almost entirely in unattributed dialogue. 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 offered a shorter and more accessible picture of Gaddis's worldview. Instead of struggling against misanthropy or reluctantly giving ground to it, 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 —which earned him his second National Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.
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, 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.

Legacy and influence

Among fans of post-modern fiction, Gaddis is 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 : for example, postmodern authors such as Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon seem to have been influenced by Gaddis, 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.
Jonathan Franzen, who in an essay in The New Yorker called Gaddis "an old literary hero of mine", dubbed him '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." Franzen continued: "In the four decades following the publication of The Recognitions, Gaddis's work grew angrier and angrier. It's a signature paradox of literary postmodernism: the writer whose least angry work was written first."
Characters in fiction based on Gaddis include "Harry Lees" in Chandler Brossard'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. The characters "Richard Whitehurst" in Kurt Wenzel's Lit Life: A Novel and "Joshua Gel" in Stephen Dixon's I: A Novel likely are based on Gaddis. Authors clearly influenced by Gaddis include Jonathan Franzen, David Markson, Joseph McElroy and Stanley Elkin.
His life and work are the subject of a comprehensive website, , 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. The first book-length biography, Joseph Tabbi's Nobody Grew but the Business: On the Life and Work of William Gaddis, was published by Northwestern University Press in May 2015.

Awards and honors

Beside the awards for particular works, Gaddis has received three other awards and honors:
Fiction
Non-fiction