William Gaddis (December 29, 1922 – December 16,
1998) was an American novelist. He wrote five novels, two of which
won
National Book Awards.
Biography
Gaddis was
born in New York
City
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 to receive 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. He worked as a
fact checker for The New Yorker for two years, then spent
five years traveling in Central
America, the Caribbean
, North Africa, and
Paris
, 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 ("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 his only 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 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,
Jonathan Franzen, 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. Much of the annotations on
the site are the work of
Steven
Moore, the critic who recognized Gaddis's genius early.
Gaddis's
papers are collected at Washington
University in St. Louis
.
Awards
Gaddis has received the following awards and honorary positions:
Works
See also
References
External links
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