William Gaddis, 1922-1998. American author 

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Collection Description

Papers, ca. 1902-1998 

Preliminary processing finished.

Access: Majority open with a few items restricted per request of the estate

William Thomas Gaddis, Jr. was born on December 29, 1922 in Manhattan and raised in Massepequa (Long Island), by his parents, Edith and William Thomas Gaddis, Sr..  His   father left the family when he was three years old. Two years later, Edith sent her only child to Merricourt Boarding School in Berlin, Connecticut. Gaddis continued in private school until the eighth grade, after which he returned to Long Island to receive his diploma at Farmingdale High School in 1941. 

Gaddis entered Harvard University on scholarship in the fall of 1941, where he continued until an illness forced him to take a medical leave of absence. After being reinstated at Harvard in the fall of 1942, Gaddis majored in English. By the fall of 1943, Gaddis had joined the staff the Harvard Lampoon, a publication for which he would eventually serve as President. After leaving Harvard without a degree in 1945, Gaddis moved to Greenwich Village. During this time, he worked at the New Yorker; however, his most important hours were spent socializing with the emerging Beat Generation and working on his first novel, The Recognitions (1955). During this period, Gaddis also traveled throughout Central America, Europe, and Northern Africa.

Shortly after the publication of The Recognitions, Gaddis married his first wife, Patricia Black, who would give birth to his only children: Sarah and Matthew. 
As his first novel was not well-received by academia, literary critics, or the purchasing public, from the late 1950s-the mid 1970s, Gaddis worked for Pfizer International, Eastman Kodak, IBM, and the United States Army, among others, as a speechwriter and/or screenwriter to support his family. 

However, in 1975, twenty years after his first novel, he published J.R., which would go on to win a National Book Award in 1976. By this time, he was also involved in his second marriage to Judith Thompson, which would dissolve shortly after J.R. was published. By the late 1970s, Gaddis had entered into a relationship with Muriel Oxenberg Murphy, with whom he would reside until the mid-1990s. 
Gaddis' third novel Carpenter's Gothic (1985), which he called a 'romance,' would be nominated for a PEN/Faulkner Award, while his fourth novel, A Frolic of His Own (1994), would earn him a second National Book Award in 1995, thus proving that, while read by a small, but particularly exacting audience, he was one of the century's most demanding and influential American novelists. This assertion is further supported by the fact that Gaddis was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Guggenheim, a Lannan Foundation grant, and a MacArthur Foundation award. Moreover, he was a member of PEN and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 

Although an American writer, Gaddis would essentially become more popular in Europe than in the United States, especially in the countries of Germany and France, who translated all of his works. 

William Thomas Gaddis died in 1998 officially of prostate cancer, although he also suffered from emphysema among other ailments. His final work, Agapé, Agape was published in the fall of 2002. 

Gaddis maintained his privacy in life partially because of the cold reception of his first book and partially because he believed that a work of art should stand on its own. The acquisition of his papers by Washington University gives scholars new and exciting access to the life and work of William Gaddis, an author who has been overlooked too long in American literature. 

Moreover, the process of William Gaddis' writing, illustrated by his literary archive, demonstrates a technique that is essentially without equal. Furthermore, his relationships with authors such as Joseph Heller, William S. Burroughs, John Updike, William Gass, Stanley Elkin, John Hawkes, David Markson, and Don DeLillo offer a glimpse into the American literary culture of the twentieth century that is insightful and complemented further by Washington University's other contemporary American manuscript holdings. 

The William Gaddis papers consist largely of his own manuscript material: manuscripts and source material toward his books, drafts of various stories, published and unpublished, as well as essays, reviews, interviews, and a miscellaneous assortment of notes and other materials. Also present is a substantial amount of personal and general correspondence, primarily with family, friends, and fans. In addition, there is a relatively large amount of correspondence to editors, translators, and publishers, as well as correspondence with his colleagues in the literary community. 

--Biographical text courtesy of Crystal Alberts 

Bibliography:

A Gaddis Bibliography Originally compiled by Steven Moore 
with additional contributions from The Gaddis Project members.
http://www.williamgaddis.org/bibliography.shtml 

Bloom, Harold. Ed. Twentieth-century American literature. v. 3 (New York : Chelsea House Publishers, 1985-1988). 
Kuehl, John and Steven Moore ed. In Recognition of William Gaddis. (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1984). 
Moore, Steven. William Gaddis. (Boston, Mass. : G.K. Hall, c1989). 
William Gaddis: A Selected Bibliography. Review of Contemporary Fiction 2.2 (Summer 1982): 55-56.
Wolfe, Peter. A Vision of his Own: The Mind and Art of William Gaddis. (Madision, NJ : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997).

Selected Names

Gaddis, William, 1922-1998.  American author 

Ackerman, Diane, 1945- . American author
Auchincloss, Louis, 1917- . American author
Brandel, Marc, 1919- . American author
Burroughs, William S., 1914-1997. American author
DeLillo, Don, 1936- . American author
Elkin, Stanley, 1930-1995. American author
Gardner, John, 1933- . British author
Gass, William H., 1922- . American author
Halpern, Daniel, 1945- . American author
Hawkes, John, 1925- . American author
Heller, Joseph, 1923-1999. American author
Markson, David, 1927- . American author
Ozick, Cynthia, 1928- . American author
Plimpton, George, 1927-2003. American author
Updike, John, 1932- . American author
Williams, Joy, 1944- . American author
 

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