William Gaddis

Dictionary thick and cascading with uncountable plots, themes, and schemes, William Gaddis' novels burst with characters who can't seem to stop talking—questioning, explaining, justifying—and who, more often than not, make things worse by doing so. Through his cast of thousands, which includes struggling artists, grasping litigants, and a pre-teen millionaire, Gaddis aims his bitter misanthropy and surgically precise satire at everything he finds hypocritical, shady, and disingenuous in contemporary American culture. When it came out in 1955, critics almost universally trashed his first book, The Recognitions, with its themes of forgery, authenticity, and the philosophical meaning of value, but thanks to a clutch of die-hard believers, it never sank entirely from view. Twenty years later, JR, an unrelenting assault on greed and sleight-of-hand business procedures written almost exclusively in unassigned dialogue, earned Gaddis a National Book Award—and some overdue vindication. Nearly another twenty years later, A Frolic of His Own saw Gaddis tilting at the byzantine absurdities of the legal system, resulting in his most accessible work and another National Book Award. Despite such accolades, Gaddis' reputation as a "difficult" writer stuck primarily because he strove to be one, to counter the moral dangers of knowingly contributing to a culture that pandered by proffering entertainment in place of edification. His intolerance for compromise—and the landmark fiction he produced as a result of it—earned him his stature as a giant of contemporary fiction.