William Gaddis

His father left when he was three, and the household that remained was his mother's. Edith Gaddis worked her way up from secretary at the New York Steam Corporation to chief purchasing agent, and at five he was sent from Massapequa, Long Island, to a boarding school in Berlin, Connecticut. He stayed in private schools through the eighth grade. In his teens a fever nobody could name, finally called erythema grave, kept him out of school for a long stretch and cut his weight to 79 pounds. He reached Harvard in 1941, ran the Lampoon, and was asked to leave in 1944 after an altercation with the police. Then a year fact-checking at The New Yorker, then five years in Mexico, Central America, Spain and North Africa.

The Recognitions appeared in 1955, 956 pages on forgery and counterfeit in every register the culture offers. Reviewers were hostile or baffled and almost nobody bought it. For the next 20 years he wrote corporate speeches and industrial films for Pfizer, Kodak and IBM to pay the bills. Then J R, published in 1975, won the National Book Award: a novel told almost entirely in unattributed dialogue, in which an 11-year-old builds a paper financial empire from a school payphone. Carpenter's Gothic followed, then A Frolic of His Own and a second National Book Award, then Agapē Agape.

The books are hard, and not by accident. Unattributed dialogue, no chapter breaks, hundreds of pages with nowhere to rest. Jonathan Franzen, an admirer, called The Recognitions the most difficult book he ever read to the end and titled the essay Mr. Difficult. Gaddis is the standard example of the writer more admired than read. His defenders argue the difficulty does work: the noise on the page is the noise of the culture, and J R is about how money talks while people do not. His detractors argue it is labor without payment. The counterattack came early. In 1962 Jack Green went through the 55 reviews of The Recognitions one by one in a self-published broadsheet, finding errors, borrowed lines and evidence that reviewers had not finished the book. It was collected in 1992 as Fire the Bastards!

In 1982 the MacArthur Foundation gave him one of its fellowships, which is what the culture does with a writer it will not read: it pays him. Election to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters followed in 1989, a Lannan lifetime achievement award in 1993. The influence ran further than the sales did. Don DeLillo, a friend, Thomas Pynchon, whose early style resembled his closely enough that readers guessed Pynchon was a Gaddis pen name, and David Foster Wallace all worked ground he broke, and all are read more than he is. He died of prostate cancer at home in East Hampton on December 16, 1998, having finished Agapē Agape but not seen it published.

William Gaddis's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Recognitions book
  956 pages on art forgery and counterfeit. Reviewed badly, sold almost nothing, later named to TIME's list of the 100 best novels since 1923 1955
• J R book
  Told almost entirely in unattributed dialogue. Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction 1975
• Carpenter's Gothic book
  Shorter and more accessible, on religious fundamentalism and apocalyptic thinking 1985
• A Frolic of His Own book
  A novel of American litigation, and his second National Book Award 1994
• Agapē Agape book
  A novella finished in 1998 and published four years after his death 2002
• The Rush for Second Place book
  His collected nonfiction, published posthumously 2002

• December 29, 1922 aged 0 Born in New York City His parents separated when he was three and his mother raised him in Massapequa, Long Island.
• 1928 aged ~6 Sent at five to Merricourt Boarding School in Berlin, Connecticut He remained in private schools until the eighth grade.
• 1944 aged ~22 Asked to leave Harvard after an altercation with the police He had entered in 1941 and served as president of the Lampoon.
• April 1946 aged 23 Leaves The New Yorker after 14 months of fact-checking Five years of travel in Mexico, Central America, Spain and North Africa followed. He returned in 1951.
• 1955 aged ~33 Publishes The Recognitions to hostile and baffled reviews Newspaper critics called it overly intellectual, overwritten and disgusting.
• 1962 aged ~40 Jack Green attacks the reviewers one by one in Fire the Bastards! Green went through 55 reviews and found factual errors in almost half of them.
• 1975 aged ~53 Publishes J R after 20 years of corporate writing It won the National Book Award for Fiction the following spring.
• 1982 aged ~60 Receives a MacArthur Fellowship
• December 16, 1998 aged 75 Dies of prostate cancer at home in East Hampton, New York He had finished Agapē Agape, which appeared in 2002.

• Don DeLillo b. 1936
  Novelist of American crowds, media saturation and disaster friend
• Thomas Pynchon b. 1937
  The great American postmodern novelist, who has not been photographed in public since the 1950s. influenced
• David Foster Wallace 1962–2008
  Novelist and essayist whose Infinite Jest became a defining postmodern American novel. influenced
• Vladimir Nabokov 1899–1977
  Author of Lolita, Pale Fire and Speak, Memory shared the subject of forgery and artifice
• Norman Mailer 1923–2007
  Novelist and journalist who won two Pulitzer Prizes and helped establish literary nonfiction. postwar contemporary