William Gaddis - Legacy and Influence

Legacy and Influence

Among fans of post-modern fiction, Gaddis is often acknowledged as being one of the greatest of American post-war novelists. A critic who early on appreciated his work and recognized its value is Steven Moore: in 1982 he published A Reader's Guide to William Gaddis's "The Recognitions" and in 1989 a monograph on Gaddis in the Twayne series. Gaddis's influence is vast (although frequently subterranean): for example, postmodern authors such as Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon seem to have been influenced by Gaddis (indeed, upon publication of V., Pynchon was actually speculated to have been a pen name for Gaddis due to the similarity of styles and the dearth of information about the two authors; the Wanda Tinasky letters also claimed that Gaddis, Pynchon, and Jack Green were the same person), as well as authors such as Joseph McElroy, William Gass, David Markson, and David Foster Wallace, who have all stated their admiration for Gaddis in general and The Recognitions in particular. Jonathan Franzen, who in an essay in The New Yorker called Gaddis "an old literary hero of mine", dubbed him 'Mr. Difficult', stating that "by a comfortable margin, the most difficult book I ever voluntarily read in its entirety was Gaddis' nine-hundred-and-fifty-six-page first novel, The Recognitions." Franzen continued: "In the four decades following the publication of The Recognitions, Gaddis's work grew angrier and angrier. It's a signature paradox of literary postmodernism: the writer whose least angry work was written first."

Characters based on 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. (DeLillo was a friend of Gaddis.) The characters "Richard Whitehurst" in Kurt Wenzel's Lit Life: A Novel (2001) and "Joshua Gel" in Stephen Dixon's I: A Novel (2002) likely are based on Gaddis. Authors clearly influenced by Gaddis include Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections), David Markson (Epitaph for a Tramp), Joseph McElroy (A Smuggler's Bible) and Stanley Elkin (The Magic Kingdom).

His life and work are the subject of a comprehensive website, The Gaddis Annotations, which has been noted in at least one academic journal as a superior example of scholarship using new media resources. Gaddis's papers are collected at Washington University in St. Louis.