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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Power doesn’t corrupt people, people corrupt power.
—William Gaddis
Topics: Power
Stupidity is the deliberate cultivation of ignorance
—William Gaddis
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