Gaddis was born in New York City to William Thomas Gaddis, who worked "on
Wall Street and in politics", and Edith (Charles) Gaddis, who worked her way up from being secretary to the president of the New York Steam Corporation to an executive position as its chief purchasing agent. When he was three, his parents separated and Gaddis was subsequently raised by his mother in
Massapequa,
Long Island. At age 5 he was sent to Merricourt Boarding School in
Berlin, Connecticut. He continued in private school until the eighth grade, after which he returned to Long Island to receive his diploma at Farmingdale High School in 1941. He entered Harvard in 1941 where he was a member of
The Harvard Lampoon (where he eventually served as president), but was asked to leave in 1944 due to an altercation with police. He worked as a
fact checker for
The New Yorker for little over a year (late February 1945 until late April 1946), then spent five years traveling in Mexico, Central America, Spain, France, England, and North Africa, returning to the United States in 1951. His first novel,
The Recognitions, appeared in 1955. A lengthy, complex, and allusive work, it had to wait to find its audience. Newspaper reviewers considered it overly intellectual, overwritten, and disgusting. Seven years later, the book was defended by
Jack Green in a series of broadsheets blasting the critics; the series was collected later under the title
Fire the Bastards!. Gaddis then turned to
public relations work and the making of documentary films to support himself and his family. In this role he worked for
Pfizer,
Eastman Kodak,
IBM, and the
United States Army, among others. He also received a
National Institute of Arts and Letters grant, a
Rockefeller grant, and two
National Endowment for the Arts grants, all of which helped him write his second novel. In 1975 he published
J R, told almost entirely in unattributed dialogue. Its eponymous protagonist, an 11-year-old, learns enough about the stock market from a class field trip to build a financial empire of his own. Critical opinion had caught up with him, and the book won the
National Book Award for Fiction. ''
Carpenter's Gothic'' (1985) offered a shorter and more accessible picture of Gaddis's sardonic worldview, focusing on religious fundamentalism and apocalyptic thinking. Instead of struggling against misanthropy (as in
The Recognitions) or reluctantly giving ground to it (as in
J R), ''Carpenter's Gothic
wallows in it. The continual litigation that was a theme in that book becomes the central theme and plot device in A Frolic of His Own'' (1994)—which earned him his second National Book Award and was a finalist for the
National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Gaddis died at home in
East Hampton, New York, of prostate cancer on December 16, 1998, but not before creating his final work,
Agapē Agape (the first word of the title is the Greek
agapē, meaning divine, unconditional love), which was published in 2002, a novella in the form of the last words of a character similar but not identical to his creator.
The Rush for Second Place, published at the same time, collected most of Gaddis's previously published nonfiction. ==Family life==