William Gaddis was born in Manhattan, New York City in 1922, a year which saw the publication of two of the great works of literary modernism, Joyce’s
Ulyssesand Eliot’s
The Waste Land, whose techniques of multi-voiced narration and literary allusion would have a profound effect on Gaddis’s own working methods. In the early 1940s he attended Harvard but left without a degree. After working as a fact-checker at
The New Yorkerin the mid-1940s, he travelled to Europe, North Africa, Spain and South America and wrote his first novel, the monumental
The Recognitions(1955). This ambitious and allusive work, nearly one thousand pages long, took the theme of art forgery, counterfeiting and fraud as a grim metaphor for contemporary social and political relations and met with mostly…
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Citation: Dempsey, Peter. "William Gaddis". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 11 December 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1665, accessed 23 November 2024.]