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Books by William Gaddis
Born: 12/29/1922; Died: 12/16/1998
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William Gaddis Biography & Notes
William Gaddis (1922 - 1998) was an American novelist, born in Manhattan.
He entered Harvard in 1941, but was asked to leave in 1944, after a drunken brawl. He worked as a fact checker for The New Yorker in 1946, then moved to Central America. 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.
Gaddis then turned to public relations work and the making of documentary films to support himself and his family. In 1975 he published JR, an even more difficult work than The Recognitions, told entirely in dialogue, with no direct indication of who is speaking at any given time. 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. 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 here.
Carpenter's Gothic (1985) offered a shorter and more accessible picture of Gaddis's sardonic worldview. The continuing litigation that was a theme in that book takes center place in A Frolic of His Own (1994), 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, Agap� Agape (published in 2002), a novella in the form of the last words of a character similar but not identical to his creator.
He entered Harvard in 1941, but was asked to leave in 1944, after a drunken brawl. He worked as a fact checker for The New Yorker in 1946, then moved to Central America. 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.
Gaddis then turned to public relations work and the making of documentary films to support himself and his family. In 1975 he published JR, an even more difficult work than The Recognitions, told entirely in dialogue, with no direct indication of who is speaking at any given time. 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. 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 here.
Carpenter's Gothic (1985) offered a shorter and more accessible picture of Gaddis's sardonic worldview. The continuing litigation that was a theme in that book takes center place in A Frolic of His Own (1994), 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, Agap� Agape (published in 2002), a novella in the form of the last words of a character similar but not identical to his creator.
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Agape Agape by William Gaddis ( 2003)
A dying man lies in bed thinking about how he will write a book and grumbling about the pending fall of civilization, in the final novel by the late, National Book Award-winning author of A Frolic of His Own. Reprint.
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Agape se paga/ Agape Agape by William Gaddis ( 2008) |
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Carpenter's Gothic by William Gaddis ( 1999)
This story of raging comedy and despair centers on the tempestuous marriage of an heiress and a Vietnam veteran. From their "carpenter gothic" rented house, Paul sets himself up as a media consultant for Reverend Ude, an evangelist mounting a grand crusade that conveniently suits a mining combine bidding to take over an ore strike on the site of Ude's African mission. At the still center of the breakneck action is Paul's wife, Liz, and over it all looms the shadowy figure of McCandless, a geologist from whom Paul and Liz rent their house. As Paul mishandles the situation, his wife takes the geologist to her bed and a fire and aborted assassination occur; Ude issues a call to arms as harrowing as any Jeremiad -- and Armageddon comes rapidly closer. Displaying Gaddis's inimitable virtuoso dialogue, and his startling treatments of violence and sexuality, Carpenter's Gothic "shows again that Gaddis is among the first rank of contemporary American writers (Malcolm Bradbury, The Washington Post Book World).
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A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis ( 1995)
William Gaddis has been a fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and the winner of a MacArthur Prize. Author of THE RECOGNITIONS, JR, and CARPENTER'S GOTHIC, Mr. Gaddis is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
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JR by William Gaddis ( 1993)
J.R., an 11-year-old, becomes a wizard of Wall Street, and a writer named Jack Gibbs is trying to finish a book titled "Agape Agape". Gaddis's second novel won the National Book Award in 1975.
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The Recognitions by William Gaddis ( 1995)
Gaddis's brilliantly experimental first novel, undervalued when it was published in 1974, is generally considered a masterwork of American literature. The 1000-page story is about Wyatt Gwyon, an artist from an old New England family, who devotes his life to obsessively copying the great Flemish Old Masters, seeking not merely to copy but to reproduce the conditions--physical, psychological, spiritual--under which they worked. Gwyon's skill earns him the attention of unscrupulous forgers. The "recognitions" Gaddis has in mind are the recognition of reality, of true art, of one's real self, and of love; his title is taken from an anonymous third-century treatise on the search for salvation, RECOGNITIONS OF CLEMENT, and he claimed in a notebook that his novel was originally "quite explicitly a parody on the Faust story."
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The Rush for Second Place Essays and Ocassional Writings by William Gaddis, Joseph Tabbi ( 2002)
A collection of essays and critical writings by the late author of the National Book Award-winning A Frolic of His Own ranges from "Stop Player, Joke No. 4," Gaddis's first published piece, to the title essay about missed opportunities in America in the past fifty years, to "Old Foes with New Faces," a study of the relationship between the writer and religion. Original.
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