William Gaddis

Peter Dempsey (University of Sunderland)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

Born 29 Dec 1922
Died 16 Dec 1998
Activity 1942-1998

Places

Born in United States
Active in United States

Activities

Primary

Novelist

Resources

Gaddis' Works

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William Gaddis was born in Manhattan, New York City in 1922, a year which saw the publication of two of the great works of literary modernism, Joyce’s

Ulysses

and Eliot’s

The Waste Land

, whose techniques of multi-voiced narration and literary allusion would have a profound effect on Gaddis’s own working methods. In the early 1940s he attended Harvard but left without a degree. After working as a fact-checker at

The New Yorker

in the mid-1940s, he travelled to Europe, North Africa, Spain and South America and wrote his first novel, the monumental

The Recognitions

(1955). This ambitious and allusive work, nearly one thousand pages long, took the theme of art forgery, counterfeiting and fraud as a grim metaphor for contemporary social and political relations and met with mostly…

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1312 words

Citation: Dempsey, Peter. "William Gaddis". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 11 December 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1665, accessed 21 November 2024.]