James Purdy

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Born in Ohio on July 17, 1914, James Purdy consistently avoided personal publicity, arguing that his work was his biography. As a result of this decision, the details of his personal life are often sketchy. One of three sons born to William and Vera (Covick) Purdy, who divorced when he was only a small child, Purdy spent his teenaged years in Chicago. He attended both the University of Chicago and the University of Puebla in Mexico.

Purdy spent a number of years abroad, particularly as an interpreter in Latin America, Spain, and France. In addition to his linguistic work, he tried teaching, first as a faculty member at Lawrence University in Wisconsin from 1949 to 1953, then as a lecturer for the United States Information Agency in Europe in 1982, and finally as an instructor of fiction writing at New York University in the 1980’s.

Still, most of Purdy’s life was devoted to his writing. At the beginning of his career, he could not attract the attention of editors and publishers, and he had his first two books privately published. Purdy sent copies of these two books to writers that he admired, and one in particular, the English poet Dame Edith Sitwell, helped him acquire a European publisher, a development that led eventually to an American publishing contract.

From that moment, his output was prolific. In fact, Purdy published more than fifty volumes of fiction, poetry, and drama. Although his works did not garner him a popular audience, he continued to hone his craft. Purdy lived and worked in Brooklyn Heights, New York until his death at age 94 on March 13, 2009.

Biography

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James Amos Purdy was born in Fremont, Ohio, on July 17, 1914, the son of William and Vera Purdy, and he told many interviewers that the exact location of his birthplace is now unknown, since the community no longer exists. Purdy’s parents were divorced when he was quite young. He lived, as he once said, with his father for a time in various locations and at other times with his mother and an aunt who had a farm, an experience which he has recalled favorably.

Purdy explained that his ethnic background was that of a very long line of Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, but that most of his family were deceased, as were many of his oldest friends. Purdy’s formal education began with his attendance at the University of Chicago, where he was to drop out during World War II to serve with the U.S. Air Corps. He indicated that he was not the best of soldiers but that his military service gave him the necessary background for his later novel Eustace Chisholm and the Works (1967).

Purdy also attended for a time the University of Puebla, Mexico, and enrolled in graduate school at the University of Chicago. He taught from 1949 to 1953 at Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin, and later worked as an interpreter in Latin America, France, and Spain. In 1953, however, he gave up other work to pursue a full-time career as a writer.

Although he was a prolific writer throughout his career, Purdy’s fiction, while enjoying considerable critical success, was not commercially successful, a fact that Purdy often attributed to a conspiratorial elite in New York that foists more commercial, but less substantive, literature on the American public.

Purdy’s early work was rejected by most major American publishing houses, and his first fiction was published privately by friends in the United States and later through the help of writers such as Carl Van Vechten and, in Great Britain, Edith Sitwell. Both Purdy’s volumes Sixty-three: Dream Palace and Don’t Call Me by...

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My Right Name, and Other Stories were printed privately in 1956, and in 1957, the novella Sixty-three: Dream Palace appeared with additional stories under the title Color of Darkness, published by Gollancz in London. These early works gained for Purdy a small, devoted following, and his allegorical novel Malcolm followed in 1959. In that work, Malcolm, a beautiful young man, is led by older persons through a wide range of experiences, until he finally dies of alcoholism and sexual hyperesthesia. In a way, Malcolm is a forerunner of many Purdy characters, whose driven states of being take them ultimately to disaster. (Malcolm was later adapted to play form by Edward Albee, an admirer of Purdy’s work. The 1966 New York production, however, was not successful.)

Two Purdy novels of the 1960’s expanded the author’s literary audience: The Nephew (1960) explores small-town life in the American Midwest and centers on the attempt of an aunt to learn more about her nephew (killed in the Korean War) than she had known about him in his lifetime, and Cabot Wright Begins (1964) is a satirical attack on the totally materialistic American culture of consumers and competitors, where all love is either suppressed or commercialized. Cabot Wright Begins relates the comic adventures of a Wall Street broker-rapist who manages to seduce 366 women. The novel was sold to motion-picture firms, but the film version was never made.

The inability of people to deal with their inner desires—a major theme of Purdy’s fiction—and the resultant violence provoked by that inability characterize Purdy’s next novel, Eustace Chisholm and the Works. Another recurring Purdy theme is that of the self-destructive, cannibalistic American family, in which parents refuse to let go of their children and give them an independent life of their own. That self-destructive family theme and his earlier motif—the search for meaning in an unknown past—mark his trilogy of novels Sleepers in Moon-Crowned Valleys, the first volume of which, Jeremy’s Version, appeared in 1970 to considerable critical acclaim. The second and third volumes of the trio of novels, however, The House of the Solitary Maggot (1974) and Mourners Below (1981), received little critical notice. Purdy once said that parts of the trilogy had come from stories that his grandmother had related to him as a child at a time when he was living with her.

Perhaps the most bizarre of Purdy’s novels, I Am Elijah Thrush, was published in 1972. Set in New York, the novel deals with an aged male dancer (once a student of Isadora Duncan and known as “the most beautiful man in the world”) who becomes obsessed with a mysterious blond, angelic child known as Bird of Heaven, a mute who communicates by making peculiar kissing sounds.

Purdy’s later works reinforce these themes of lost identity and obsessive but often suppressed loves: In a Shallow Grave concerns a disfigured Vietnam veteran who has lost that most personal form of identity, his face; Narrow Rooms (1978) details the complex sexual relationships of four West Virginia boys who cannot cope with their emotional feelings for one another and who direct their feelings into garish violence. That novel, Purdy said, was partially derived from fact; Purdy said that he frequently ran into hillbilly types in New York who told him such terrible stories of their lives.

Purdy’s later works include On Glory’s Course (1984), In the Hollow of His Hand (1986), and the 1989 novel dealing with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), Garments the Living Wear. His novel In a Shallow Grave was made into a motion picture in 1988.Purdy, who remained unmarried, continued to live and write in Brooklyn, New York until his death on March 13, 2009 at age 94.

Biography

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James Amos Purdy was born on July 17, 1914, near Fremont, Ohio. He attended the University of Chicago and the University of Puebla in Mexico. Later, he worked as an interpreter in Spain, Latin America, and France. From 1949 until 1953, he taught at Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin. In 1953, he decided to devote himself to writing full time. Purdy received Guggenheim Fellowships in 1958 and 1962 and a Ford Fellowship in Drama in 1961. He took a teaching post at New York University and settled in Brooklyn Heights, New York. On March 13, 2009, Purdy died in New Jersey.