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James Purdy Has Died

Sad news. James Purdy has died. Purdy's great novella Malcolm was published 50 years ago, and found favour immediately with a slapdash cabal of wits, misfits and weird modernists - but was equally ignored by the more "preppy" (his words) crowd.

I read Malcolm at 14, and it had an instant effect - its grotesque flamboyant perversity enchanted me. Oddly enough, I never read more of him after that - you know how polymorphous teen readers are - there were others to curl up in bed with.

Still, reading about his career again in the New York Times obituary it struck me as surprising he had lived so long, and been quite so marginal.
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Anonymous said…
Purdy was clearly far from marginal, Todd. It's more that his reception in America after a certain time period was marginal. But critical or popular reception of a writer's work and its artistic quality are beasts of a different order.

If Purdy's work has been translated into over 30 different languages, beyond America, it has had a very wide reception. Salinger is very widely known but hardly as expansive in scope and with but a few books, miles from being as prolific as Purdy, who aside from his novels wrote short stories, plays, and poems, many of which were made into songs and operas. Between his vociferous condemnation of the literary establishment and the difficultly of his subject matter, it's not surprising that his later work didn't receive the accolades that his earlier work did, at least in America. The coming century will end in proving his great artistic merit. Melville was forgotten in his own lifetime but today he remains one of our most important writers. It will be the same with Purdy.
Tue Mar 17, 02:15:00 pm 2009
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