Before the obituary a personal note: On November 12, 1986, I had dinner with Mr Purdy. One of the great things about New York City at that time was that you could actually look people up in the phone book. James Purdy was listed in Brooklyn, and with an intrepid spirit that can only come from youth, I called him. A slight southern accent greeted me and after a few formal introductions, he asked, "do you like pizza?" And so it was on a balmy night in Brooklyn, I met Mr Purdy for pizza. I had so wanted to be like one of his charismatic characters but instead I was greeted by the horrible reality, I was nervous. I had read every book he had written and thought his novels would make perfect screenplays. That was my pretense. I have no idea if Mr Purdy enjoyed our evening. He did sign my original copy of I am Elijah Thrush: "For Randy Dunbar with sweet wishes, James Purdy. We have met in Brooklyn, November 12, 1986."
James Purdy, whose dark, often savagely comic fiction evoked a
psychic American landscape of deluded innocence, sexual obsession,
violence and isolation, died on Friday morning at Englewood Hospital in
New Jersey. He was 94 and, after a period of declining health, had
recently broken his hip, said his close friend and assistant, John
Uecker.
Wayward and unclassifiable, Mr. Purdy, the author of the novels
“Malcolm” and “The Nephew,” labored at the margins of the literary
mainstream, inspiring veneration or disdain. His nearly 20 novels and
numerous short stories and plays either enchanted or baffled critics
with their gothic treatment of small-town innocents adrift in a corrupt
and meaningless world, his distinctive blend of plain speech with
ornate, florid locutions and the hallucinatory quality of his often
degraded scenes.
“I can describe my books as I see them as American, imaginative,
symbolic,” he told an interviewer for the reference work World Authors.
“My literary ancestors are two other Calvinists, Hawthorne and
Melville. In another interview, he said he was attracted only to
stories that “bristled with impossibilities.”
A book of his work for the stage, “Selected Plays of James Purdy,” will be published this spring by Ivan R. Dee.
Mr. Purdy had lived in Brooklyn Heights but most recently had been
in the Actors’ Fund of America Nursing Home in Englewood, N.J. Though
he is frequently described as having been born in 1923, Mr. Uecker said
that he was, in fact, born in 1914.