James Otis Purdy (July 17, 1914 March 13, 2009) was an American novelist, short-story writer, poet, and playwright who, from his debut in 1956, published over a dozen novels, and many collections of poetry, short stories, and plays. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages and in 2013 his short stories were collected in The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy.
He has been praised by writers such as Edward Albee, James M. Cain, Lillian Hellman, Francis King, Marianne Moore, Dorothy Parker, Dame Edith Sitwell, Terry Southern, Gore Vidal (who described Purdy as "an authentic American genius"), Jonathan Franzen (who called him, in Farther Away, "one of the most undervalued and underread writers in America"), A.N. Wilson, and both Jane Bowles and Paul Bowles.
Purdy was the recipient of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Fiction Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1993) and was nominated for the 1985 PEN/Faulkner Award for his novel On Glory's Course (1984). In addition, he won two Guggenheim Fellowships (1958 and 1962), and grants from the Ford Foundation (1961), and Rockefeller Foundation.
He worked as an interpreter, and lectured in Europe with the United States Information Agency.
Early life, education and early career Purdy was born in Hicksville, Ohio, in 1914.D.S.S. Form 1 Military Draft Registration Card completed on October 16, 1940. Place of Birth is listed as "Findlay, Ohio", Date of Birth is listed as "July 17, 1916" (2 years after his listed date of birth), Employer's Name is listed as "N.P.A. Writers Project" and Place of Employment or Business is listed as "433 E. Erie Chicago Cook Ill." His family moved to Findlay, Ohio, when he was about five years old, where he graduated from Findlay High School in 1932. Purdy's parents went through a separation and then a bitter divorce in 1930 after his father lost large sums of money in investments gone bad. His mother then converted their home in Findlay to a boarding house of which she was proprietress.Snyder, page 212
Purdy earned a Bachelor of Arts teaching degree in FrenchSnyder, page 17 from Bowling Green State College in 1935, and taught French at the Greenbrier Military School in West Virginia. Then he studied at the University of Chicago, where he earned a master's degree in English in 1937. He joined the United States Army in May 1941."Index Record for James O Purdy WII Army Enlistment Records", (Army Serial Number 36032352), content source is the United States National Archives and Records Administration accessed from Fold3 by Ancestry.com website. Retrieved July 10, 2022.
Purdy wrote his Master’s Thesis on British novelist Ronald Firbank—“Ronald Firbank: The End of the Decadent Tradition” (dated December 1936)—and later many critics noted Firbank’s influence on Purdy’s novels.Snyder pp. 49-50, 235, 242, 275, 326, 328. Steven Moore, Ronald Firbank: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Materials (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1996), pp. 103-4.
After serving in the Army, he studied Spanish at the University of Chicago (1944–45). He spent the summer of 1945 at the University of Puebla, Mexico, and taught English at the Ruston Academy in Havana, Cuba, in 1945–1946. For the next nine and a half years, he taught Spanish at Lawrence College, in Appleton, Wisconsin. In the mid-1950s, with encouragement and support from Miriam and Osborn Andreas and the Andreas Foundation (Archer Daniels Midland), Purdy returned to Chicago to pursue writing.
Artistic scenes and influences In 1935, soon after his arrival in Chicago to attend the University of Chicago, Purdy, broke and without friends, met the painter Gertrude Abercrombie. She was nicknamed the "Queen of the Bohemian Artists". His vast body of work includes many works inspired by his close relationship with Abercrombie and her underground salon (which had its roots in the salon of Gertrude Stein). During the 1930s, Purdy was one of Abercrombie's closest friends. This American incarnation of the creative parlour had at the center those who were to become the jazz greats: Percy Heath, Sonny Rollins, Erroll Garner, Dizzie Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Max Roach, Miles Davis and Sarah Vaughan. Purdy attended the all-night, weekend gatherings where bebop and jazz were improvised by these greats (many times with Abercrombie at the piano). The concerts impressed him deeply. "Through these jazz singers and musicians, who would often stay with Abercrombie, young Purdy received an intensive education in African American music and culture."Snyder, p. 45 Indeed, the high incidence of black figures in Purdy's work went unnoticed by critics and reviewers because they were so thoroughly integrated. Equally important was his intensive study as a young boy of the Old Testament in the King James Version of the Bible as well as the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. All were key in making Purdy the writer he became. For quite some time during his Chicago years, Purdy lived in Abercrombie's "ruined" mansion, with members of the Modern Jazz Quartet.
The music and lives these jazz musicians were able to create from their own humble origins inspired Purdy to realize that he could create a uniquely individual voice in literature, using his American small-town speech patterns and his worlds of poverty and neglect. Abercrombie and those in her "circle" had done the same with painting. They had "taken the essence of our music and transported it to another form", according to her friend and fellow artist Dizzie Gillespie. Purdy's associations with these jazz artists and especially his meeting with Billie Holiday gave him the insight as well as the confidence to move from an upstart and lost boy, prone to running wild, to a world-class writer and artist. His relationship to the painters in Abercrombie's circle of magic realists Ivan Albright, Dudley Huppler, Karl Priebe, Julia Thecla, and John Wilde helped develop the strokes of imagery he would use to create his own version of an American "magic realism" in literature.
Writing The influence of Chicago's jazz scene and the experience of the "New Negro Renaissance" is reflected in all his early work.
It begins with the short story "Eventide" printed first in the private collection Don't Call Me by My Right Name and then commercially in the collection Color of Darkness (Teeboy who would never be coming home again, played the tenor saxophone at The Music Box and had his hair made straight), to the novella 63 Dream Palace (63rd Street is home to the Chicago jazz scene), then to Children is All, Cabot Wright Begins, and Eustace Chisholm and the Works.
Even his small-town Ohio novel The Nephew echoes the story of the boy who would never be coming home again. "Eventide" was the pivotal story which led to his becoming a published writer. His final novel Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue harks back to a remembrance of painter Abercrombie and others in her circle of artists.
Narrow Rooms (1977) is, at an initial level, a personal communication looking back some 25 years to Wendell Wilcox, a failed writer in the Abercrombie circle. Wilcox, who had once enjoyed a degree of success, stopped publishing at the very moment Purdy began commercial publication.
Always of major significance was jazz both in Chicago and New York City. Shortly after his move to New York City, Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance circle became a lens for his work.Hughes, Langston (2002) "Carl Van Vechten: An Appreciation", pp. 418–420 in Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Vol. 9, Essays on art, race, politics, and world affairs. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press. The comic novels I am Elijah Thrush, Out with the Stars and Garments the Living Wear are the New York incarnations of this reflection.
Abercrombie also introduced the young student to others in her circle, to Miriam Bomberger Andreas and to the industrialist and literary essayist, Osborn Andreas, both of whom would become extremely significant in Purdy's life and work. His first book, Don't Call Me by My Right Name and Other Stories, was privately published by Osborn with the Andreas Foundation. The title story is based on Andreas' wife, Miriam. His first five books, with the exception of The Nephew, were inspired by his association with Miriam and Osborn Andreas. His first novel, which set forth his own developing style of American magic realism, was praised lavishly by Dorothy Parker and others of great literary merit. It was for decades a staple of the undergraduate American Literature curriculum of many American colleges and universities.
If Abercrombie and the Andreases inspired Purdy to become a writer, then Dame Edith Sitwell made him a known one. When she received the privately printed edition, which Purdy had on a hunch sent to her, of Don't Call Me by My Right Name and Other Stories, she was convinced she had discovered a great black writer from the story "Eventide", which she felt only a black man could write. After she had asked Purdy to supply more instances of his work, Purdy sent her his newly published private edition of 63: Dream Palace. Both books were designed by Purdy with his own unique drawings. Upon the additional basis of this new work, Sitwell had become convinced that he was "a writer of genius" (her words); and she obtained a serious commercial publisher for his work in England. She would later write the prefaces for the publication of both these works. Her reviews, pronouncements, and assessments of his further works helped him create a coterie of supporters (notably Parker and Angus Wilson) both in England and the U.S. Purdy felt he would never have been a known writer without her: "My stories were always returned with angry, peevish, indignant rejections from the New York slick magazines and they earned if possible even more hostile comments from the little magazines. All editors were insistent that I would never be a published writer."
Obstacles to wider acceptance Through all his work, Purdy dealt primarily with outsiders: women, blacks, Native Americans (his maternal grandmother was 1/8 Ojibway), homosexuals (living far outside the conventional gay community) – anyone who could be seen to be outside the circle of "normal" acceptability. His final short story, Adeline, written at age 92, is a tale of transgender acceptance. Much of his early work takes place in extreme poverty, and is located in a small-town, heightened American vernacular. In the beginning of her assessment of him, Sitwell felt he was always writing the black experience without necessarily mentioning race. Purdy's association with the American black experience is paramount to understanding him as an artist. In addition to his beginnings with Abercrombie, Van Vechten took him up when he arrived in New York City and introduced him to his own important New York City circle of black artists, boxers and activists. Langston Hughes praised Purdy as "the last of the [n-word] writers" for his use of the vernacular. He was seen as a master of different kinds of American vernacular as well.