James Purdy
James Purdy was born in Fremont, Ohio, United States on July 17th, 1914 and is the Novelist. At the age of 94, James Purdy biography, profession, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, measurements, education, career, dating/affair, family, news updates, and networth are available.
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James Otis Purdy (July 17, 1924-2009), an American novelist, short-story writer, poet, and playwright who, from his debut in 1956, has published over a dozen books, short stories, and plays.
His books have been translated into more than 30 languages, and in 2013 he was included in The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy. Edward Albee, James M. Cain, Lillian Hellman, Francis King, Matthew Moore, Dorothy Parker, "one of America's most undervalued and underread writers"), Jonathan Franzen (who called him "an authentic American genius"), A.N.
Wilson, Jane Bowles, and Paul Bowles. Purdy received 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 book On Glory's Course (1984).
In addition,, he received two Guggenheim Fellowships (1958 and 1962), Ford Foundation (1961), and the Rockefeller Foundation (1961). He served as an interpreter and lectured in Europe with the US Information Agency.
Early life, education and early career
Purdy was born in Hicksville, Ohio, in 1914. 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.
Purdy earned a Bachelor of Arts teaching degree in French 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.
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.
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 to Abercrombie and to 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." 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 was living 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. His 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.