James Purdy

Martin Kich (Wright State University)

Ed. by Emory Elliott, University of California, Riverside
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

Born 17 Jul 1914
Died 13 Mar 2009
Activity 1943-2009

Places

Born in United States
Active in United States

Cultural Identities

LGBTQ

Activities

Primary

Novelist
Playwright / Dramatist
Poet
Satirist
Story-writer

Resources

Purdy's Works

Save to Bookshelf

From the very beginning of his career in the mid-1950s, James Purdy has remained one of the most enigmatic figures of post-World War II American literature. Over the last 45 years he has regularly produced work across a variety of genres: nineteen novels, nine collections of short fiction (including, in several instances, works in other genres), nine collections of poetry, five published plays and six others that have been produced. His work has garnered him several literary prizes, including the Morton Dauwen Zabel Fiction Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for

On Glory's Course

(1984). Writers as diverse as Dame Edith Sitwell, John Cowper Powys, Dorothy Parker, Marianne Moore, Gore Vidal, and Jerome Charyn have sung his praises. Three book-length critical studies of his…

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

601 words

Citation: Kich, Martin. "James Purdy". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 17 July 2001 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3666, accessed 25 November 2024.]