16 Facts About William Gaddis

The Letters of William Gaddis was published by Dalkey Archive Press in February 2013.

When he was three, his parents separated and William Gaddis was raised by his mother in Massapequa, Long Island.

William Gaddis continued in private school until the eighth grade, after which he returned to Long Island to receive his diploma at Farmingdale High School in 1941.

William Gaddis entered Harvard in 1941 where he was a member of The Harvard Lampoon, but was asked to leave in 1944 due to an altercation with police.

William Gaddis worked as a fact checker for The New Yorker for little over a year, then spent five years traveling in Mexico, Central America, Spain, France, England, and North Africa, returning to the United States in 1951.

William Gaddis then turned to public relations work and the making of documentary films to support himself and his family.

William Gaddis received a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant, a Rockefeller grant, and two National Endowment for the Arts grants, all of which helped him write his second novel.

William Gaddis died at home in East Hampton, New York, of prostate cancer on December 16,1998, but not before creating his final work, Agape Agape, which was published in 2002, a novella in the form of the last words of a character similar but not identical to his creator.

The Rush for Second Place, published at the same time, collected most of William Gaddis's previously published nonfiction.

In May 1955 William Gaddis eloped with Patsy Thompson Black, a model and actress who had come to New York from North Carolina to break into theater.

In 1968 William Gaddis married Judith Thompson, a journalist and later an antiques dealer.

Characters in fiction based on William Gaddis include Harry Lees in Chandler Brossard's 1952 novel Who Walk in Darkness, Harold Sand in Jack Kerouac's autobiographical 1958 novella The Subterraneans and possibly Bill Gray in Don DeLillo's 1991 novel Mao II.

William Gaddis's papers are collected at Washington University in St Louis.

The first book-length biography, Joseph Tabbi's Nobody Grew but the Business: On the Life and Work of William Gaddis, was published by Northwestern University Press in May 2015.

William Gaddis's works have been translated into a number of foreign languages, including French, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Swedish, Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Russian.

Beside the awards for particular works, William Gaddis received three other awards and honors:.