James Purdy, whose underground classics such as “Cabot Wright Begins” and “Eustace Chisholm and the Works” inspired censorious outrage and lasting admiration, has died.
Spokesman Walter Vatter of Ivan Dee Publishers said Purdy had been in poor health and died Friday morning at Englewood Hospital in New Jersey. Reports of his age have differed, but according to his literary agency, Harold Ober Associates, he was 94.
Purdy published poetry, drawings, the plays “Children Is All” and “Enduring Zeal,” the novels “Mourners Below” and “Narrow Rooms,” and the collection “Moe’s Villa and Other Stories.” Much of his work fell out of print; several books were reissued in recent years.
Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams and Dorothy Parker were among his fans, but Purdy won few awards and was little-known to the general public. He spent most of his latter years in a one-room Brooklyn apartment, bitterly outside what he called “the anesthetic, hypocritical, preppy and stagnant New York literary establishment.”
He was attacked for his “adolescent and distraught mind,” accused of writing “fifth-rate, avant-garde soap opera” and left out of the country’s official literary establishment — the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was also called a comic genius worthy of Voltaire and an outlaw, in the best sense, among his compromised peers.
His debut, “63: Dream Palace,” came out in 1956. He followed with such novels as “The Nephew,” “Malcolm” and “Cabot Wright Begins,” stories of innocent young men, needy older women and, in the case of “Cabot Wright,” literary elitism, sexual violence and indiscreet bodily noises.
