Nobody Grew but the Business: On the Life and Work of William Gaddis

Author:   Joseph Tabbi
Publisher:   Northwestern University Press
ISBN:  

9780810131422


Pages:   304
Publication Date:   30 May 2015
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   Temporarily unavailable   Availability explained
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Nobody Grew but the Business: On the Life and Work of William Gaddis


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Overview

During his lifetime, William Gaddis (1922–1998) evaded biographical questions, never read from his work publicly, and didn’t allow his photograph to appear on his books. Before his novel J R (1975) won Gaddis the National Book Award and some measure of renown, he had given up the bohemian world of 1950s Greenwich Village for a series of corporate jobs that both paid the bills and provided an inside view of the encroachment of market values into every corner of American culture. By illustrating the interconnectedness of Gaddis’s life and work, Tabbi, among his foremost interpreters, demystifies the “difficult author” and shows a writer who was as attuned as any to the way Americans talk, and who sensitively chronicled the gradual commodification of artistic endeavor. Illuminating, heartbreaking, and masterful, Tabbi’s book gives us the most subtly drawn portrait to date of one of the twentieth century’s seminal novelists.

Full Product Details

Author:   Joseph Tabbi
Publisher:   Northwestern University Press
Imprint:   Northwestern University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.60cm , Height: 2.10cm , Length: 23.40cm
Weight:   0.598kg
ISBN:  

9780810131422


ISBN 10:   0810131420
Pages:   304
Publication Date:   30 May 2015
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Undergraduate ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Temporarily unavailable   Availability explained
The supplier advises that this item is temporarily unavailable. It will be ordered for you and placed on backorder. Once it does come back in stock, we will ship it out to you.

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Reviews

Joseph Tabbi has woven a text of William Gaddis s major themes--of counterfeits, bankers, lawyers, the religious, the nosey most of us--and permits us to follow these paths without dwelling on mere gossip, complaint, or revelation. Joseph Tabbi actually thinks about how public and private lives mingle. He surprises us too, with large and small facts--for instance, I bet most readers don t know that Gaddis once had a job on a dredger on the Mississippi River near St. Louis. What pleases me most: Tabbi stresses, in work of Gaddis s sort, the importance of the music of its prose, as out of the babble of human speech emerge the sympathies of art. --William H. Gass In Nobody Grew but the Business, Joseph Tabbi interweaves the skillful communication of unknown details of Gaddis s life with astute readings of his major works. I found it a wonderful book, extraordinarily pleasurable to read and quite moving. --Mark Greif In this long-awaited biography, Tabbi shows that a significant amount of Gaddis s writing was autobiographical, and that Gaddis mined his own family history for characters, themes, and stories. . . . Valuable and worthy. . . . Shines a bright light on a great, enigmatic American novelist. -- Publishers Weekly


Joseph Tabbi has woven a text of William Gaddis's major themes--of counterfeits, bankers, lawyers, the religious, the nosey most of us--and permits us to follow these paths without dwelling on mere gossip, complaint, or revelation. Joseph Tabbi actually thinks about how public and private lives mingle. He surprises us too, with large and small facts--for instance, I bet most readers don't know that Gaddis once had a job on a dredger on the Mississippi River near St. Louis. What pleases me most: Tabbi stresses, in work of Gaddis's sort, the importance of the music of its prose, as out of the babble of human speech emerge the sympathies of art. --William H. Gass In Nobody Grew but the Business, Joseph Tabbi interweaves the skillful communication of unknown details of Gaddis's life with astute readings of his major works. I found it a wonderful book, extraordinarily pleasurable to read and quite moving. --Mark Greif In this long-awaited biography, Tabbi shows that a significant amount of Gaddis's writing was autobiographical, and that Gaddis mined his own family history for characters, themes, and stories. . . . Valuable and worthy. . . . Shines a bright light on a great, enigmatic American novelist. --Publishers Weekly


Joseph Tabbi has woven a text of William Gaddis's major themes--of counterfeits, bankers, lawyers, the religious, the nosey most of us--and permits us to follow these paths without dwelling on mere gossip, complaint, or revelation. Joseph Tabbi actually thinks about how public and private lives mingle. He surprises us too, with large and small facts--for instance, I bet most readers don't know that Gaddis once had a job on a dredger on the Mississippi River near St. Louis. What pleases me most: Tabbi stresses, in work of Gaddis's sort, the importance of the music of its prose, as out of the babble of human speech emerge the sympathies of art. --William H. Gass</p> In <i>Nobody Grew but the Business</i>, Joseph Tabbi interweaves the skillful communication of unknown details of Gaddis's life with astute readings of his major works. I found it a wonderful book, extraordinarily pleasurable to read and quite moving. --Mark Greif</p> In this long-awaited biography, Tabbi shows that a significant amount of Gaddis's writing was autobiographical, and that Gaddis mined his own family history for characters, themes, and stories. . . . Valuable and worthy. . . . Shines a bright light on a great, enigmatic American novelist. --<i>Publishers Weekly</i></p>


Joseph Tabbi has woven a text of William Gaddis s major themes of counterfeits, bankers, lawyers, the religious, the nosey most of us and permits us to follow these paths without dwelling on mere gossip, complaint, or revelation. Joseph Tabbi actually thinks about how public and private lives mingle. He surprises us too, with large and small facts for instance, I bet most readers don t know that Gaddis once had a job on a dredger on the Mississippi River near St. Louis. What pleases me most: Tabbi stresses, in work of Gaddis s sort, the importance of the music of its prose, as out of the babble of human speech emerge the sympathies of art. William H. Gass In Nobody Grew but the Business, Joseph Tabbi interweaves the skillful communication of unknown details of Gaddis s life with astute readings of his major works. I found it a wonderful book, extraordinarily pleasurable to read and quite moving. Mark Greif In this long-awaited biography, Tabbi shows that a significant amount of Gaddis s writing was autobiographical, and that Gaddis mined his own family history for characters, themes, and stories. . . . Valuable and worthy. . . . Shines a bright light on a great, enigmatic American novelist. Publishers Weekly


Author Information

Joseph Tabbi is the author of Cognitive Fictions (2002) and Postmodern Sublime: Technology and American Writing from Mailer to Cyberpunk (1995). He edited and introduced William Gaddis’s The Rush for Second Place: Essays and Occasional Writings (2002), and wrote the afterword for the Penguin Classics edition of Agape, Agape (2003). The editor of the electronic book review, Tabbi is professor and associate head of the English Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA.

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