The last time I saw Stanley Elkin, we were speeding through a late Manhattan night in a van. I was in the front next to the driver, looking out at the street ruts winter had left behind. Stanley was in an open space in the back, strapped into his wheelchair, which was, in turn, yoked to the floor. It was 1992, and we were returning from the National Book Award ceremony in a funk. It was the third time he had been nominated for the award, and the third time he had lost.

Bumping along in the dark, trussed up in his tux with a runner-up medal festooning his neck, Stanley was inconsolable. As the road got worse, I could hear his hands thwack against the armrests and his head flop from side to side. Soon he was bobbing like a balloon in the wind. "Goddamn New York potholes!" he finally roared, half in a rage, and half with diabolical glee. It was vintage Elkin—a moment that could have been pulled from the life of Bobbo Druff, city commissioner of streets and luckless hero of The MacGuffin, his novel that hadn't taken the prize that year.

Stanley Elkin died last week in St. Louis of complications arising from his 23-year struggle with multiple sclerosis. He was 65. Merle King Professor of Modern Letters at Washington University and easily one of the greatest virtuosos of the American language, he produced 10 novels, two volumes of novellas, one volume of short stories, one collection of essays, and three published scripts.

I was Elkin's editor for a time—an oxymoron if ever there was one, for Elkin's books needed no editing. They sprang full-blown from the man's head, magical riffs of irreverent wisdom. Their heroes, like him, are the powerless but shrewd, setting out into an unjust world like Brooklyn bred Don Quixotes: off to tilt at windmills with little more than a mouthful of fast talk.

For all his yearning to be known by the greater American public, however, Elkin remained a writer's writer: an artist who was envied and exalted by the literary world, but whose works went undiscovered by the common man they strived to depict. Cynthia Ozick said of him, "Stanley Elkin is no ordinary genius of language, laughter, and the irresistible American idiom; he is an ingenious genius—an inimitable sword-swallower, fire-eater, and three-ring circus of fecund wit."

Elkin was born in the Bronx and grew up in Chicago. He was the eldest son of a costume jewelry salesman, a hereditary fact that predisposed him (he always said) to looking at words as if they were glittering gewgaws ready for the stringing.

After graduating from South Shore High School in Chicago, he attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he completed a BA (1952), a master's (1953) and a doctorate (1961) in English. He served in the U.S. Army from 1955 to 1957. He was a visiting professor at many colleges, including Yale, Smith and the University of Iowa, but for most of his career he was an English professor at Washington University in St. Louis, where he taught writing until his death last Wednesday.

Although he could be seriously funny, much of Elkin's work is about the angst at the heart of American mass culture. Boswell, his first novel (1964), tells the tale of a modern-day biographer whose gnawing sense of his own mortality and mediocrity leads him to surround himself with bizarre people he perceives to be famous. His second book, Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers (1966), is a much-loved collection of nine short stories—sketches of an array of oddballs—that Harvard's Helen Vendler has likened to a dazzling show of "naked bravado and ostentation."

George Mills (1982), the novel that won Elkin the National Book Critics Circle Award, is about 40 generations of workers who are all named George Mills and who are all trapped in their blue-collar jobs. In The Magic Kingdom (1985), a group of terminally ill children is taken to explore the surreal landscape of Disney World. In The MacGuffin (1991), the aforementioned Bobbo Druff combs city streets in an existential daze and wonders when the traffic and his life got so far out of control. Among Elkin's most recent works are Pieces of Soap (essays, 1992), Van Gogh's Room at Arles (novellas, 1993) and the forthcoming novel Mrs. Ted Bliss, to be published in September.

When Elkin was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner award in 1994 and didn't win, his daughter Molly (one of three children Elkin had with his wife Joan), went to the ceremony in his place. "My father couldn't be here," she told the audience, "because of his debilitating disease…. Oh, I don't mean that one," she added when a knowing hush descended on the room. "I mean his writer's ego." He couldn't bear the torment of watching someone else get the glory again.

And yet, it was that not-getting-the-glory-thing that sharpened his wit and fed his imagination. Here Stanley Elkin ultimately found a victory: He became America's past master at taking defeat and weaving it, word by word, onto filaments of gold. "As long as you've got your health," he wrote, "you've got your naivete. I lost the one, I lost the other, and maybe that's what led me toward revenge—a writer's revenge anyway, the revenge, I mean, of style."