William Gaddis

William Gaddis (December 29, 1922 – December 16, 1998) was an American novelist, who is now considered one of the most important American authors of the post-WW2 period. Deeply influenced by the Modernist novels of the early 20th-century, and the works of James Joyce in particular, Gaddis invented a highly complex, sardonic style that was, in the 1950's and 60's when Gaddis first began to publish, unlike almost anything being written by other American authors. While most other American authors of Gaddis' period had followed in the vein of modern realism as seen in Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Gaddis' prose freely experimented with form and language, in a style that is both incredibly difficult and at times incredibly difficult. As a result of his uniqueness, Gaddis was largely misunderstood by critics during his life-time, and although he would eventually win two National Book Awards for JR (1975) and A Frolic of His Own (1994), Gaddis' importance to the history of American literature has only, in very recent years, begun to be fully appreciated. Today, critics believe Gaddis to be a writer who lived in a time of critical transition, not only politically, but artistically: Gaddis' works are now seen as a major link between the works of the early English Modernists such as Joyce and contemporary American postmodernist authors such as Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon. Gaddis' savagely funny sense of satire, his enormous erudition, and his uncanny talent for language and dialogue in particular have made him one of the most memorable and unique fiction writers in recent American history.

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. 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, after a drunken brawl. 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 would have to wait to find its audience. Newspaper reviewers considered it overly intellectual, overwritten, and, in some cases, obscene. (The book was notably defended by Jack Green in a series of broadsheets blasting the critics, which were later collected in a volume and published under the title Fire the Bastards!) Shortly after publishing The Recognitions, Gaddis married his first wife, Patricia Black, who would give birth to his only children: Sarah and Matthew.

Greatly disappointed by the failure of The Recognitions to win a wide audience, Gaddis swore off writing for twenty years. He turned to doing public relations work and making documentary films for corporations to support himself and his family. In this role he worked for Pfizer International, 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 JR, an even more difficult work than The Recognitions, and a tour de force technical achievement. The 700-page novel is told almost entirely in dialogue, with no direct indication of who is speaking at any given time, and it is only through Gaddis' phenomenal talent for capturing the language and speech-patterns of his large cast of characters that the reader is able to coherently navigate the text. In the novel, its eponymous protagonist, J.R., an 11-year-old, learns enough about the stock market from a class field trip to build a financial empire of his own.

By the time JR was published, critical opinion had finally caught up with Gaddis, and the book won the National Book Award. A few years later the hugely successfully television show Dallas featured a tycoon named "JR," albeit somewhat older, and the real-life market of the '80s and since has borne an alarming resemblance to some of the machinations described in Gaddis' novel. Gaddis' marriage to his second wife, Judith Thompson, dissolved shortly after the book was published.

Carpenter's Gothic (1985) offered a much shorter and more accessible picture of Gaddis's sardonic worldview. The satire of the American legal system and frivolous litigation that was a major theme in Carpenter's Gothic takes center stage in A Frolic of His Own (1994)—another sprawling, incredibly complex novel which earned Gaddis his second National Book Award, and an American Book Award.

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 Gaddis himself. 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: 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 contemporary writers such as Christopher Wunderlee and Jonathan Safran Foer, while authors such as Joseph McElroy, William Gass, 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.

External links

• The William Gaddis papers at Washington University in St. Louis
• The William Gaddis pages at The Modern Word website
• The Gaddis Annotations, a comprehensive web site

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