CABOT WRIGHT BEGINS

Rediscovery of Purdy.
"Anything that Purdy writes is a literary event of importance."(Susan Sontag)

New edition Liveright Publishing/W.W. Norton (US & Canada) Editor: Robert Weil CABOT WRIGHT BEGINS, first published in 1964, may be one of the most neglected materpieces in post-World War II American literature. It tells the story of Chicago car salesman Bernie Gladhart who, spurred on by his ambitious wife, decides to write a novel about a recently paroled serial rapist, Cabot Wright. As Bernie tries to track down Wright in Brooklyn, he encounters a series of bizarre and Dickensian characters and sets in motion an extraordinary chain of events. Unsparing yet prophetic in its portrayal of everything from television to Wall Street, race, urban poverty, and especially sex, Purdy's comic fiction evokes "an American psychic landscape of deluded innocence, sexual obsession, violence and isolation. (New York Times) See also: article from The Quarterly Conversation (“The Art of Disturbance: On the Novels by James Purdy”) and a clip highlighting his work alongside news about the fantastically popular television show Breaking Bad, outsider painter Howard Finster, and k.d. lang's lost classic soundtrack to EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES on This Week in the Culture.