Novelist, born in New York City, USA. He studied at Harvard, then worked as a freelance speech and scriptwriter before making his mark with the novel The Recognitions (1955), a complex story using experimental language, which drew acclaim from some quarters and incomprehension from others. A radical satirist, he was one of America's most prominent contemporary novelists; his other works include JR (1976), Carpenter's Gothic (1985), and A Frolic of His Own (1993).
Biography
Gaddis was born in Manhattan 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. 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. (The book was defended by Jack Green in a series of broadsheets blasting the critics, which was collected later under the title Fire the Bastards!) Shortly after its publication, Gaddis married his first wife, Patricia Black, who would give birth to his only children: Sarah and Matthew.
Gaddis then turned to public relations work and the making of documentary films to support himself and his family. In 1975 he published J R, an even more difficult work than The Recognitions, told almost entirely in dialogue, with no direct indication of who is speaking at any given time. 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. 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 an American Book Award--where it seems that everyone is suing someone. (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. His influence is vast (although frequently subterranean): for example, postmodern authors such as Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon seem to have been influenced by Gaddis, it has been noted that Gaddis' dialectical narrative style is echoed in the works of Christopher Wunderlee and Jonathan Safran Foer, while authors such as Joseph McElroy, William Gass, David Markson, David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen have all stated their admiration for Gaddis in general and The Recognitions in particular.
Works
The Recognitions (1955) J R (1975) Carpenter's Gothic (1985) A Frolic of His Own (1994) Agapē Agape (2002) The Rush for Second Place (2002)The Gaddis Annotations
With the advice of noted Gaddis scholar, Steven Moore, The Gaddis Annotations is a comprehensive online Gaddis resource edited by Victoria Harding. With extensive annotations for each of Gaddis's novels, a complete bibliography of primary and secondary sources, and the entire text of Moore's monograph on Gaddis, The Gaddis Annotations is considered to be one of the finest examples of scholarship utilizing new media resources, even receiving coverage in academic journals.
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