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| birth_place = New York City, New York, US19981612|29}}East Hampton (town), New York>East Hampton, New York| education = Harvard University| alma_mater =| period = 1955–1998| genre = Novel| subject =Postmodern literature>Postmodernism| notableworks = The Recognitions (1955)J R (1975)A Frolic of His Own (1994)| awards = National Book Award| signature =}}William Thomas Gaddis, Jr. (December 29, 1922 â€“ December 16, 1998) was an American novelist.WEB,weblink William Gaddis, 1922–1998. American author, Alberts, Crystal, August 11, 2005, Washington University Libraries, Department of Special Collections, June 7, 2010, yes,weblink" title="web.archive.org/web/20040912051827weblink">weblink September 12, 2004, mdy-all, NEWS, William Gaddis, 75, Innovative Author Of Complex, Demanding Novels, Is Dead, Gussow, Mel, The New York Times, December 17, 1998,weblink June 7, 2010, The first and longest of his five novels, The Recognitions, was named one of TIME magazine's 100 best novels from 1923 to 2005NEWS,weblink Time, All Time 100 Novels, October 16, 2005, and two others, J R and A Frolic of His Own, won the annual U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.National Book Foundation: Awards: "National Book Award Winners: 1950–2009". Retrieved March 28, 2012.A collection of his essays was published posthumously as The Rush for Second Place (2002). 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.Entropy in William Gaddis's Novels {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110713185027weblink |date=July 13, 2011 }}"William Gaddis: A Portfolio," Conjunctions 41 (2003), 373–415.

Biography

Gaddis was born in New York City to William Thomas Gaddis, who worked "on Wall Street and in politics", and Edith (Charles) Gaddis, an executive for the New York Steam Corporation.WEB,weblink Gaddis, William : American National Biography Online - oi, Oxfordindex.oup.com, 2016-08-01, 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 where he was a member of the Harvard Lampoon (where he eventually served as President), but was asked to leave in 1944 due to an altercation with police.WEB,weblink Len, Gutkin, The Last Obscenity: William Gaddis’s Collected Correspondence, June 3, 2013, Los Angeles Review of Books, 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, 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!)"Fire The Bastards!: The Great Defender of William Gaddis". Mark O'Connell. The New Yorker, February 20, 2012. 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,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."National Book Awards â€“ 1976". National Book Foundation. Retrieved March 28, 2012. (With essay by Chad Post from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.)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.(File:Raban 1-101013.jpg|thumb|William Gaddis, by Martin Dworkin)Carpenter's Gothic (1985) offered a shorter and more accessible picture of Gaddis's (wiktionary:sardonic|sardonic) worldview. Instead of struggling against misanthropy (as in The Recognitions) or reluctantly giving ground to it (as in J R), 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"National Book Awards â€“ 1994". National Book Foundation. Retrieved March 28, 2012. (With essay by Harold Augenbraum from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.) 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, AgapÄ“ Agape (the first word of the title is the Greek agapÄ“, 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.

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 (although frequently subterranean): for example, postmodern authors such as Don DeLillo and Thomas PynchonWEB, Who's Writing Whose Writing? Gaddis, Green, Pynchon, and Tinasky,weblink 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.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.""Mr. Difficult: William Gaddis and the Problem of Hard-to-Read Books". Jonathan Franzen. The New Yorker, September 30, 2002. Transcribed by adilegian.com 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."Yannis Livadas mentions in his essay on "Recognitions": "…Gaddis’ postmodernism is crucial, empowered with internal transmissions which, although they are fragile, are capable enough to break the narrative tactic and not to point out themselves but the subjective consequences which exemplify the recovery of an existential language, the establishment of a truth which may invalidate any historiography, any comparison of goals, any attempt to assimilate the order and meaning of both life and literary writing..."Yannis Livadas#An indicative list of essays published in literary reviewsCharacters 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. (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).WEB, The Gaddis Annotations: Gaddis in Fiction,weblink June 20, 2011, 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.JOURNAL, 10.2307/30039831, Grayson, Erik, 2005, Harding, Victoria, Moore, Steven, The Gaddis Annotations, Modern Language Studies, 35, 2, 107–109, 30039831, 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:

• The MacArthur Foundation’s "Genius Award" (1982);
• Election to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1989);
• The Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement (1993).

Works

Fiction

• The Recognitions (1955)
• J R (1975)
• Carpenter's Gothic (1985)
• A Frolic of His Own (1994)
• AgapÄ“ Agape (completed 1998, published 2002)

Non-fiction

• The Rush for Second Place (collection, published 2002)

See also

• List of novelists from the United States

References

{{Reflist|30em}}

External links

• The Gaddis Annotations, a comprehensive scholarly site
• {{worldcat id|id=lccn-n81-43116}}
• weblink" title="web.archive.org/web/20130105111232weblink">The William Gaddis Papers at Washington University in St. Louis
• weblink" title="web.archive.org/web/20051211003009weblink">The William Gaddis pages at The Modern Word
• JOURNAL,weblink William Gaddis, The Art of Fiction No. 101, Paris Review, Winter 1987, Zoltán Abádi-Nagy,
• JOURNAL,weblink John Sherry, In Recognition. Remembering William Gaddis., Hamptons Country, June 1999,
• William Gaddis at Library of Congress Authorities, with 15 catalog records

{{William Gaddis}}{{NBA for Fiction 1975–1999}}{{Authority control}}