Collections
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| The Rush for Second Place | 2002 | Buy |
| Agapē Agape | 2002 | Buy |
Non-Fiction
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| The Letters of William Gaddis | 2013 | Buy |
Standalone Novels
| Title | Published | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|
| The Recognitions | 1955 | Buy |
| JR | 1975 | Buy |
| Carpenter’s Gothic | 1985 | Buy |
| A Frolic of His Own | 1994 | Buy |
William Gaddis was an American novelist born in 1922 in New York. He published his first novel, The Recognitions, in 1955 after years of work. The book ran to nearly 1,000 pages and received mixed reviews on publication before being reassessed as a major work of American literature. It follows a forger of Flemish paintings through a satirical portrait of mid-twentieth-century artistic and intellectual life.
Gaddis waited twenty years before publishing his second novel, JR, in 1975. The book won the National Book Award and consists almost entirely of overheard telephone conversations and dialogue, telling the story of an eleven-year-old boy who builds a financial empire through junk mail. It is considered one of the most formally demanding American novels of the postwar period. Carpenter’s Gothic followed in 1985, a much shorter and more concentrated work, and A Frolic of His Own (1994) returned to comic satire with a novel about litigation that won a second National Book Award.
Gaddis died in 1998. His work has been a significant influence on novelists including Jonathan Franzen, who has written extensively about Gaddis’s importance to his own development. A posthumous collection of essays and a volume of selected letters were published in the 2000s.