To the Lowest Hell with America: On James Purdy
In the 1960s, James Purdy’s writing was celebrated by such writers as Gore Vidal, Dorothy Parker, Tennessee Williams, and Paul Bowles. His first novel, Malcolm , was adapted as a Broadway play by Edward Albee. In 1964, Susan Sontag said that “anything Purdy writes is a literary event of importance”. On the cover of Tony Tanner’s 1971 study of contemporary writers, City of Words: American Fiction 1950-1970, Purdy’s name is prominently written alongside Joseph Heller, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth; Tanner argues that Purdy’s 1965 novel Cabot Wright Begins is “one of the most important novels since the war.” Through the rest of the 20th century, Purdy published a new book every year or two, but those books garnered fewer and fewer reviews, sold fewer and fewer copies, and by the end of the 1980s much of his work was out of print and his new writings were published by small presses. Even as queer writers—especially white gay male writers like Purdy—were finding success with mainstr...