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William Gaddis’s Followers (805)

William Gaddis

Born

in New York, New York, The United States

December 29, 1922

Died

December 17, 1998

Website

http://www.williamgaddis.org

Genre

Literature & Fiction

Influences

T.S. Eliot, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ivan Turgenev, Nathaniel Hawthorne, He ...more

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William Gaddis was the author of five novels. He was born in New York December 29, 1922. The circumstances why he left Harvard in his senior year are mysterious. He worked for The New Yorker for a spell in the 1950s, and absorbed experiences at the bohemian parties and happenings, to be later used as material in The Recognitions. Travel provided further resources of experience in Mexico, in Costa Rica, in Spain and Africa and, perhaps strangest to imagine of him, he was employed for a few years in public relations for a pharmaceutical corporation.

The number of printed interviews with Gaddis can be counted on one hand: he wondered why anyone should expect an author to be at all interesting, after having very likely projected the best of them William Gaddis was the author of five novels. He was born in New York December 29, 1922. The circumstances why he left Harvard in his senior year are mysterious. He worked for The New Yorker for a spell in the 1950s, and absorbed experiences at the bohemian parties and happenings, to be later used as material in The Recognitions. Travel provided further resources of experience in Mexico, in Costa Rica, in Spain and Africa and, perhaps strangest to imagine of him, he was employed for a few years in public relations for a pharmaceutical corporation.

The number of printed interviews with Gaddis can be counted on one hand: he wondered why anyone should expect an author to be at all interesting, after having very likely projected the best of themselves in their work. He has been frequently compared with Joyce, Nabokov, and especially Pynchon.

Gaddis’s first novel, The Recognitions (1955) is a 956-page saga of forgery, pretension, and desires misguided and inexpressible. Critical response to the book ranged from cool to hostile, but in most cases (as Jack Green took pains to show in his book of rebuke, Fire the Bastards!). Reviewers were ill-prepared to deal with the challenge, and evidently many who began to read The Recognitions did not finish. The novel’s sometimes great leaps in time and location and the breadth and arcane pedigree of allusions are, it turns out, fairly mild complications for the reader when compared with what would become the writer’s trademark: the unrestrained confusion of detached and fragmentary dialogue.

Gaddis’s second book, JR (1975) won the National Book Award. It was only a 726 pages long driven by dialogue. The chaos of the unceasing deluge of talk of JR drove critics to declare the text “unreadable”. Reading Gaddis is by no means easy, but it is a more lacerating and artfully sustained attack on capitalism than JR, and The Recognitions.

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 was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. There are even two Japanese cars called the Isuyu and the Sosumi.

His final work was the novella Agapē Agape which was published in 2002. Gaddis died at home in East Hampton, New York, of prostate cancer on December 16th, 1998. ...more

Combine Editions
William Gaddis’s books

Average rating: 4.1 · 15,639 ratings · 1,925 reviews · 18 distinct works • Similar authors

	The Recognitions by William Gaddis, William H. Gass (Introduction) 4.20 avg rating — 5,834 ratings — published 1955 — 43 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	J R by William Gaddis, John David Smith (Editor), Frederick R. Karl 4.31 avg rating — 3,477 ratings — published 1975 — 34 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Carpenter's Gothic 3.84 avg rating — 2,100 ratings — published 1985 — 32 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	A Frolic of His Own 3.87 avg rating — 1,670 ratings — published 1994 — 21 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Agapē Agape by William Gaddis, Sven Birkerts (Introduction), Joseph Tabbi (Afterword) 3.83 avg rating — 1,662 ratings — published 2002 — 5 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Rush for Second Place: Essays and Occasional Writings 3.65 avg rating — 231 ratings — published 2002 — 13 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Letters of William Gaddis by William Gaddis, Steven Moore (Editor), Sarah Gaddis (Afterword) 4.17 avg rating — 92 ratings — published 2013 — 7 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Agapē Agape and Other Writings 3.83 avg rating — 18 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	A Pile Fabric Primer: Corduroy/Velveteen/Velvet really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 1 rating — published 1970 — 6 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Julian Schnabel: Amor Misericordioso 0.00 avg rating — 0 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

More books by William Gaddis…

Quotes by William Gaddis (?)

“I know you, I know you. You're the only serious person in the room, aren't you, the only one who understands, and you can prove it by the fact that you've never finished a single thing in your life. You're the only well-educated person, because you never went to college, and you resent education, you resent social ease, you resent good manners, you resent success, you resent any kind of success, you resent God, you resent Christ, you resent thousand-dollar bills, you resent Christmas, by God, you resent happiness, you resent happiness itself, because none of that's real. What is real, then? Nothing's real to you that isn't part of your own past, real life, a swamp of failures, of social, sexual, financial, personal...spiritual failure. Real life. You poor bastard. You don't know what real life is, you've never been near it. All you have is a thousand intellectualized ideas about life. But life? Have you ever measured yourself against anything but your own lousy past? Have you ever faced anything outside yourself? Life! You poor bastard.”
― William Gaddis, The Recognitions

198 likes

“Justice? -You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.”
― William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own

tags: justice, law

190 likes

“If it is not beautiful for someone, it does not exist.”
― William Gaddis, The Recognitions

86 likes

See all William Gaddis's quotes »

Polls

What would you like to read as our next themed read - An Underrated Chunkster

The Quincunx by Charles Palliser

15 votes, 27.3%

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The Recognitions by William Gaddis

2 votes, 3.6%

City Sister Silver by Jáchym Topol

2 votes, 3.6%

Q by Luther Blissett

2 votes, 3.6%

Seven Types of Ambiguity by Elliot Perlman

1 vote, 1.8%

Adam Buenosayres: A Critical Edition by Leopoldo Marechal

1 vote, 1.8%

Where Tigers Are at Home by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès

1 vote, 1.8%

Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson by G.I. Gurdjieff

1 vote, 1.8%

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0 votes, 0.0%

And Ladies of the Club by Helen Hooven Santmyer

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A Moment in the Sun by John Sayles

0 votes, 0.0%

55 total votes

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William Gaddis’s Followers (805)

William Gaddis

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Combine Editions
William Gaddis’s books