JOSEPH TABBI
NOBODY GROWS BUT THE BUSINESS
On the Life and Work of William Gaddis
Northwestern University Press
(May 30, 2015)
During his lifetime, William Gaddis (1922–1998) evaded bio-graphical questions, never read from his work publicly, and didn’t allow his photograph to appear on his books. Before his novel J R (1975) won Gaddis the National Book Award and some measure of renown, he had given up the bohemian world of 1950s Green-wich Village for a series of corporate jobs that both paid the bills and provided an inside view of the encroachment of market val-ues into every corner of American culture.
By illustrating the interconnectedness of Gaddis’s life and work, Tabbi, among his foremost interpreters, demystifies the “difficult author” and shows a writer who was as attuned as any to the way Americans talk, and who sensitively chronicled the gradual commodification of artistic endeavor. Illuminating, heartbreaking, and masterful, Tabbi’s book gives us the most subtly drawn portrait to date of one of the twentieth century’s seminal novelists.
Joseph Tabbi is the author of Cognitive Fictions (2002) and Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk (1995). He edited and introduced William Gaddis’s The Rush for Second Place: Essays and Occasional Writings (2002), and wrote the afterword for the Penguin Classics edition of Agape, Agape (2003). The editor of the electronic book review, Tabbi is professor and associate head of the English Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
NOBODY GROWS BUT THE BUSINESS
On the Life and Work of William Gaddis
Northwestern University Press
(May 30, 2015)
During his lifetime, William Gaddis (1922–1998) evaded bio-graphical questions, never read from his work publicly, and didn’t allow his photograph to appear on his books. Before his novel J R (1975) won Gaddis the National Book Award and some measure of renown, he had given up the bohemian world of 1950s Green-wich Village for a series of corporate jobs that both paid the bills and provided an inside view of the encroachment of market val-ues into every corner of American culture.
By illustrating the interconnectedness of Gaddis’s life and work, Tabbi, among his foremost interpreters, demystifies the “difficult author” and shows a writer who was as attuned as any to the way Americans talk, and who sensitively chronicled the gradual commodification of artistic endeavor. Illuminating, heartbreaking, and masterful, Tabbi’s book gives us the most subtly drawn portrait to date of one of the twentieth century’s seminal novelists.
Joseph Tabbi is the author of Cognitive Fictions (2002) and Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk (1995). He edited and introduced William Gaddis’s The Rush for Second Place: Essays and Occasional Writings (2002), and wrote the afterword for the Penguin Classics edition of Agape, Agape (2003). The editor of the electronic book review, Tabbi is professor and associate head of the English Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
