34 Facts About James Purdy

James Otis Purdy was an American novelist, short-story writer, poet, and playwright who, from his debut in 1956, published over a dozen novels, and many collections of poetry, short stories, and plays.

James Purdy's work has been translated into more than 30 languages and in 2013 his short stories were collected in The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy.

James Purdy worked as an interpreter, and lectured in Europe with the United States Information Agency.

James Purdy's family moved to Findlay, Ohio, when he was about five years old, where he graduated from Findlay High School in 1932.

James Purdy's parents went through a separation and then a bitter divorce in 1930 after his father lost large sums of money in investments gone bad.

James Purdy earned a Bachelor of Arts teaching degree in French from Bowling Green State College in 1935, and taught French at the Greenbrier Military School in West Virginia.

James Purdy joined the United States Army in May 1941.

In 1935, soon after his arrival in Chicago to attend the University of Chicago, James Purdy, broke and without friends, met the painter Gertrude Abercrombie.

James Purdy was nicknamed the "Queen of the Bohemian Artists".

James Purdy attended the all-night, weekend gatherings where bebop and jazz were improvised by these greats.

For quite some time during his Chicago years, James Purdy lived in Abercrombie's "ruined" mansion, with members of the Modern Jazz Quartet.

The music and lives these jazz musicians were able to create from their own humble origins inspired James Purdy to realize that he could create a uniquely individual voice in literature, using his American small-town speech patterns and his worlds of poverty and neglect.

Wilcox, who had once enjoyed a degree of success, stopped publishing at the very moment James Purdy began commercial publication.

James Purdy's first book, Don't Call Me by My Right Name and Other Stories, was privately published by Osborn with the Andreas Foundation.

James Purdy's first five books, with the exception of The Nephew, were inspired by his association with Miriam and Osborn Andreas.

When she received the privately printed edition, which James Purdy had on a hunch sent to her, of Don't Call Me by My Right Name and Other Stories, she was convinced she had discovered a great black writer from the story "Eventide", which she felt only a black man could write.

James Purdy's final short story, Adeline, written at age 92, is a tale of transgender acceptance.

James Purdy was seen as a master of different kinds of American vernacular as well.

James Purdy started writing plays as a child, crafting them to win his elder brother's approval.

James Purdy would act all the characters in the plays, and play them out using stick-figures, which is consistent with the early origins of Federico Garcia Lorca.

James Purdy became known as a "homosexual writer" after the publication of Eustace Chisholm and the Works.

Sitwell had recognized this when she stated that James Purdy "has enormous variety".

The publishers, according to James Purdy, believed that he was insane.

James Purdy recalled in 1993 that he was "burned at the stake" in the New York Times review of Eustace Chisholm.

The attack surrounding the book chilled James Purdy's growing popularity though the book sold more copies than any of his other works.

At a loss to know how to proceed and with his career seemingly shattered, James Purdy began looking at pictures of his long-dead relatives for solace and validation.

James Purdy began to remember ever more vividly the stories his grandmother and great-grandmother told him when he was a child, about eminent people, mostly women, and most often on the outside of a hidebound code of acceptance in the long-ago towns of the hill country of Ohio.

James Purdy would follow them in their navigation through life and circumstance.

James Purdy began to create, in association with these individuals and their stories, a voice that Paul Bowles would call "the closest thing we have to a classical American colloquial".

Shortly after his death in 2009, a book of plays, Selected Plays of James Purdy, including Brice, Ruthanna Elder, Where Quentin Goes and The Paradise Circus, was published by Ivan R Dee.

James Purdy died aged 94, in a nursing home in Englewood, New Jersey, on March 13,2009.

James Purdy wrote anonymous letters from the age of nine: his first was written to his mother's landlady, whom James Purdy disliked.

The American composer Robert Helps, a close friend of James Purdy's, used James Purdy's texts in two of his works, The Running Sun and Gossamer Noons, both of which have been recorded by the soprano Bethany Beardslee.

James Purdy received the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from Publishing Triangle in 1991.