Underground classics writer dies

March 14, 2009 at 12:00a.m.

He was called a comic genius worthy of Voltaire among his compromised peers.

NEW YORK (AP) — Author James Purdy, a shocking realist and surprising romantic who in 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 died Friday morning at Englewood Hospital in New Jersey.

The Fremont, Ohio, native, whose age could not immediately be determined, was at least in his 80s and had been in poor health.

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. In the spring, Ivan Dee will issue a collection of his plays.

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 walk-up 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.

Interviewed by The Associated Press in 2005, Purdy recalled being “exposed to everything” as a child, and his books revealed the most detailed awareness of sex, violence, race, class, familial cruelty and romantic longing.

His work was labeled “gothic” for its extremes of emotion and physicality, but in his own mind, there was no sensationalism, just the impulse to write what he knew.

“When you’re writing, at least in my case, you’re so occupied by the story and the characters that you have no interest in what people may think or whether I should write to please anyone,” he said.