James Purdy born 17 July 1923 (d. 2009)Novelist James Purdy was born in Ohio and moved to Chicago when he was still in his teens. He attended the University of Chicago and the University of Puebla in Mexico. From 1949 to 1953, he taught at Lawrence College in Wisconsin and then lived abroad for some years before returning to live and work in the US.
Purdy began to publish stories in magazines in the 1940s. In the 1950s, he tried without success to find an American publisher. His first book was published privately and then by a major publisher in England, where he had many supporters in the literary world, most notably Dame Edith Sitwell and Angus Wilson.
James Purdy's novels often describe obsessive love between men for whom homosexuality is unthinkable and whose fate is inevitably bleak; the themes of alienation and violence are common. His writing is characterised by bleak pessimism, tempered with some humour, and a simplicity which veers between the monumental and the gothic. His best known works include his first novel 63: Dream Palace (1956) Eustace Chisholm and the Works (1967) In a Shallow Grave (1975) and Narrow Rooms (1978). His work has been described as 'singular', 'controversial' and 'obscure'.
Following several reissues of previously out-of-print novels, as well as an appreciation by Gore Vidal in The New York Times Book Review, Purdy's work enjoyed a renaissance. As Edward Albee wrote long ago, there is a Purdy renaissance every ten years, like clockwork. Albee has been proved right every decade since.Since the 1990s, when great age began to make itself felt, he had worked closely with his companion John Uecker (who was previously the last amanuensis of Tennessee Williams), a partnership that resulted in such late works as the novel Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue (1997) and the collection of stories Moe's Villa (2003, 2005). He continued to dictate to a small team of devoted friends, and ascribed his continued intellectual vigor to the drinking of green tea and the avoidance of alcohol and tobacco. His advice to young writers was to 'banish shame'.
Purdy continued to dictate and to draw nearly every day until his death at 94. After several years of declining health, he fractured a hip and died in Englewood, New Jersey on 13 March 2009.
Shortly after his death in 2009 a book of plays, James Purdy, Selected Plays was published. It features an insightful foreword by John Uecker (who also edited the book) about the friendship between Tennessee Williams and James Purdy. It also focuses on Purdy's play writing being his first form of writing since childhood, when he wrote plays for his brother, an actor, to perform. The book is dedicated by Purdy 'To those who stood behind me', to Tennessee Williams and John Uecker.
John Waters contributed the following blurb on the cover: 'James Purdy's Selected Plays will break your damaged little heart.' Also on the cover, Gore Vidal calls Purdy 'An authentic American genius'.
Although he never achieved either the popular success or critical acclaim he perhaps deserved, he has influenced several young gay writers.
James Purdy Society