Inspirational Quotes by William Gaddis (American Novelist)

William Gaddis (1922–98,) fully William Thomas Gaddis, was an American novelist of complex, satiric works. He is considered one of the best of the post-World War II Modernist writers.

Born in New York City and educated at Harvard, Gaddis worked for The New Yorker (1946–47) and lived and traveled abroad. He then freelanced as a speech and movie scriptwriter from 1956 until the 1970s.

Gaddis wrote four novels: The Recognitions (1955,) a densely allusive post-Christian epic about art, forgery, money, and magic; followed by JR (1976,) about an eleven-year-old ‘ragged capitalist’ operating from payphones; Carpenter’s Gothic (1985,) in which a Vietnam War veteran works as a media consultant for a fundamentalist preacher; and A Frolic of His Own (1994,) a story of litigiousness and greed in contemporary society.

Gaddis’s last work of fiction, Agape Agape (2002; published posthumously,) is a rambling first-person narrative of a dying man obsessed with the history of the player piano. A collection of Gaddis’s essays was also published posthumously as The Rush for Second Place: Essays and Occasional Writings (2002.)

The American literary theorist Harold Bloom wrote William Gaddis: Modern Critical Views (2004.)

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