First published 2013
William Gaddis avoided public attention throughout his career, making his personal correspondence all the more revealing. These letters span from his boarding school days in 1930 to just months before his death in 1998. They trace his journey from a young writer crafting The Recognitions while living in Mexico, fighting in a Costa Rican revolution, and working across Spain, France, and North Africa. The letters show him struggling for two decades to complete J R while juggling work and family responsibilities. They document his battles with divorce and creative disappointment before his career rebounded with Carpenter's Gothic. Later correspondence reveals him teaching himself legal principles to write A Frolic of His Own, which earned him a second National Book Award. The final letters capture him returning to material from the 1940s as he completed Agape Agape on his deathbed. Since Gaddis rarely wrote autobiographically in his fiction, these letters function as his inadvertent memoir, offering readers direct access to the mind behind some of postwar America's most challenging novels.
Genres: literary-fiction, american-fiction, 20th-century, non-fiction, biography-memoir, 21st-century, academic
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: epistolary, inadvertent-memoir
Setting: Costa Rica, France, Mexico, North Africa, Spain
Period: 1930s, 1940s, 1990s
600 pages · Kindle Edition · Dalkey Archive Press