James Otis Purdy (July 17, 1914 – March 13, 2009) was an American novelist, short-story writer, poet, and playwright who, from his debut in 1956, published over a dozen novels, and many collections of poetry, short stories, and plays.

He has been praised by writers as diverse as Edward Albee, James M. Cain, Lillian Hellman, Francis King, Marianne Moore, Dorothy Parker, Dame Edith Sitwell, Terry Southern, Gore Vidal (who described Purdy as "an authentic American genius"), Jonathan Franzen (who called him, in Farther Away, "one of the most undervalued and underread writers in America"), A.N.

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.

"Through these jazz singers and musicians, who would often stay with Abercrombie, young Purdy received an intensive education in African American music and culture.

[11] 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.

It begins with the short story "Eventide" printed first in the private collection Don't Call Me by My Right Name and then commercially in the collection Color of Darkness (Teeboy who would never be coming home again, played the tenor saxophone at The Music Box and had his hair made straight), to the novella 63 Dream Palace (63rd Street is home to the Chicago jazz scene), then to Children is All, Cabot Wright Begins, and Eustace Chisholm and the Works.

His final novel Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue harks back to a remembrance of painter Abercrombie and others in her circle of artists.

Narrow Rooms (1977) is, at an initial level, a personal communication looking back some 25 years to Wendell Wilcox, a failed writer in the Abercrombie circle.

His first novel, which set forth his own developing style of American magic realism, was praised lavishly by Dorothy Parker and others of great literary merit.

[23] In addition to his knowledge of modern European languages, Purdy knew Latin and ancient Greek,[2] and maintained an extensive classical library.

His final novel Gertrude of Stony Island Avenue echoes the story of Demeter descending into Hades in search of her daughter Persephone.

[25] The novels that beleaguered his reputation, such as Eustace Chisholm & the Works and Narrow Rooms, merely restate in a modern context the psychology of Dionysus set forth in The Bacchae by Euripides.

Much-later writers like David Mamet, Harold Pinter, and Samuel Beckett (also an admirer) paved the way to the acceptance of works in this "distilled" style which has now become the sine qua non of the modern audience with its very different attention span.

The major US publishing houses rejected his two early books 63: Dream Palace (1956), and Colour of Darkness (1961), which had to be printed privately abroad.

[24] As late as May 1990, the German government tried to ban Narrow Rooms, but received the ruling that it was a "work of the literary imagination which had no business in the courts".

In January 1966, an incendiary manifesto by Stanley Kauffmann set forth a bluntly damning and prejudicial way of criticizing works by homosexual writers.

All of Purdy's work after Eustace Chisholm would subsequently be met with both great praise on the one side, and stern, vehement condemnation and misunderstanding on the other.

Combined with this critical reception (and its effect on Purdy) of both Cabot Wright Begins and Eustace Chisholm & the Works was the fact that, by the time of publication of these novels, all his immediate family, his friends and his supporters had died.

This included Sitwell, Van Vechten, Parker, Powys, and Purdy's brother who had been a noteworthy actor in New York City and very important to his development in literature.

"I soon realized that if my life up to then had been a series of pitched battles, it was to be in the future a kind of endless open warfare", Purdy wrote in an autobiographical sketch in 1984.

He began to remember ever more vividly the stories his grandmother and great-grandmother told him when he was a child, about eminent people, mostly women, and most often on the outside of a hidebound code of acceptance in the long-ago towns of the hill country of Ohio.

[38][better source needed] In 1968, he began a series of independent but interconnected books (and plays) about the characters who populated these tales from his childhood, Sleepers in Moon Crowned Valleys.

He began to create, in association with these individuals and their stories, a voice that Paul Bowles would call "the closest thing we have to a classical American colloquial".

[40] Regarding Sleepers in Moon Crowned Valleys, Gore Vidal stated in his New York Times essay, "Each novel stands entire by itself while the whole awaits archeology and constitution of a work that is already like no other.

[44] On the last reprints of several of his books, a further essay by Gore Vidal in The New York Times, entitled "The Novelist As Outlaw," framed him as "an authentic American genius".

[29] In 2005, the novel that had held Purdy's reputation at bay for decades, Eustace Chisholm and the Works, received the Clifton Fadiman Award at the Mercantile Library.

"[45][46] Following several reissues of previously out-of-print novels, as well as Vidal's appreciation in The New York Times Book Review, Purdy's work again enjoyed a brief small renaissance in the first decade of the 2000s, including among younger writers.

John Waters contributed the following blurb on the cover: "James Purdy's Selected Plays will break your damaged little heart."

"[28] For nearly 50 years he lived and wrote in a small apartment in a Brooklyn Heights landmarked building surrounded by dozens of framed boxing prints from the turn of the 20th century, bare-knuckled champs in the makeshift outside rings of their day.

[citation needed] In an autobiographical sketch in 1984, Purdy stated, "My work has been compared to an underground river which is flowing often undetected through the American landscape".