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James Purdy.
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James Purdy is reluctant to talk about his early years beyond acknowledging that he was born in rural Ohio on 17 July 1923 and grew up in the Midwest, which has been the setting of several of his nove...
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One of America's most original and dynamic writers, James Purdy has always been regarded as something of an outsider. He achieved international recognition before being somewhat grudgingly recognized ...
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Critical Essay by Frank Baldanza
The structure of a typical Purdy short story has … [an epiphanic effect]: a selected moment or series of moments that body forth a spiritual or psychological st...
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Critical Essay by Jean E. Kennard
[The] world of James Purdy's novels is the Post-existential one of Heller's and of Barth's: the world has no meaning which can be rationally disc...
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Critical Essay by Jerome Charyn
"In a Shallow Grave" is a modern Book of Revelation, filled with prophesies, visions and demoniac landscapes. The moon appears to Garnet [the narrator] &#...
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Critical Essay by Katha Pollitt
Although its subject is physical passion, "Narrow Rooms" is strangely bodiless. There's almost no characterization, which makes it hard to remember...
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Critical Essay by Paul Bresnick
For Purdy, Christ's message was the last great event—the critical idea—in the history of human consciousness: "love one another as I have lo...
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Critical Essay by David Bianco
[Narrow Rooms] is a tightly woven short novel set in a rural Southern landscape….
Although there are some explicit love scenes between two men, Purdy's int...
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Critical Essay by Herbert Gold
James Purdy began to make his reputation with some stories first successfully published in England, where the praise for him had that overripe odor that characterizes a ...
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Critical Essay by Gary Krist
Mourners Below, which appeared this past summer, is Purdy's tenth full-length novel, and the book appears likely to share the same fate as its immediate predecessor...
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Critical Essay by Martin Tucker
A problem novel in which the problem is never solved, Purdy's latest book [The Nephew] is in many ways a departure from the fey and fantastic humor for which he ...
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Critical Essay by Winfield Townley Scott
There is a double edge to the quite remarkable talent of James Purdy. The simplest view of this may be taken by looking at the two novels he has so far publish...
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Critical Essay by Ihab Hassan
In the last five years James Purdy has published two novels, "Malcolm" and "The Nephew," and a collection of stories, "Color of Darknes...
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Critical Essay by Richard Horchler
[In] Children Is All, Purdy displays once more the talents, quirks and compulsions that have, in the few short years be has been publishing, moved his readers to alm...
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Critical Essay by Henry Chupack
In the three decades since the end of World War II—a period when American affluence and technological impersonality grew to astronomical heights and appeared to ...
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Critical Essay by Jerome Charyn
The story [of Mourners Below] is deceptively simple. It's a kind of battlefield where the living play dead, and the dead begin to warp those "mourners bel...
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James (Amos) Purdy
Critical Essay by Frank Baldanza
