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William Gaddis Working Library List

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.

Gaddis' 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.

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 Gaddis' 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, will be 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).

Abbey, Walter 

Abish, Walter

Ackerman, Diane

Aldridge, John W.

Ansen, Alan

Auchincloss, Louis

Brandel, Marc, 1919-

Buchanan, Cynthia, 1942-

Burroughs, William S., 1914-

Comnes, Gregory

Coover, Robert

De Kay, Ormonde, 1923-

Delbanco, Nicholas

DeLillo, Don

Dworkin, Martin S.

Elkin, Stanley, 1930-

Exley, Frederick

Fellows, Jay, 1940-

Friedrich, Otto, 1929-

Gaddis, Sarah

Gardner, John, 1933-. 

Gass, William H., 1922-

Green, Jack

Ólafur Gunnarsson

Halpern, Daniel, 1945-

Hawkes, John, 1925-

Heller, Joseph

Hills, L. Rust

Huxtable, Ada Louise

Karl, Frederick, 1927-

Kennedy, William, 1928-

Knight, Christopher J., 1952-

Koenig, Peter W.

Kuehl, John Richard, 1928-

Lambert, Jean

Leverence, John

Lurie, Alison

Markson, David

Monaghan, Charles, 1932-

Moore, Steven, 1951-

Napper, John

Newman, Charles Hamilton, 1938- 

Ozick, Cynthia, 1928-

Plimpton, George

Safer, Elaine B.

Schnabel, Julian, 1951-

Seelye, John D.

Sherry, John

Steinberg, Saul

Tabbi, Joseph, 1960-

Updike, John

West, Paul, 1930-

Williams, Joy, 1944-

Wolfe, Peter, 1933-

Manuscripts
Special Collections

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