Thomas E. Gaddis ( 1908 is a leap year starting on Wednesday (link will take you to calendar). ...1908– 1984 is a leap year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ...1984) was a The United States of America — also referred to as the United States, the U.S.A., the U.S., America¹, the States, or (archaically) Columbia — is a federal republic of 50 states located primarily in central North America (with the exception of two states: Alaska and Hawaii). ...United States author, most noted for his book Robert Franklin Stroud (January 28, 1890 – November 21, 1963), known as the Birdman of Alcatraz, was a prisoner in Alcatraz who supposedly found solace from segregation in raising and selling birds. ...Birdman of Alcatraz.
He is also well_known for the following quote:
Alcatraz, the federal prison with a name like the blare of a trombone, is a black molar in the jawbone of the nation's prison system.
Gaddis has been called the presiding genius of post-war fiction. His concern with the detrimental effects of the desire for money links him to Twain, Henry James, Dreiser and Fitzgerald, while many of the most important novelists writing today, Don De Lillo for example, have acknowledged the influence of Gaddiss fiction on their own work.
In the 1970s, Gaddis taught a course at Bard College which dealt with failure in American writing and failure is one of the great themes of American literature, the flipside of the American dream.
Gaddis is one of those writers whose role Leslie Fiedler suggests is to say nay!, to deny the easy affirmations by which we live and to expose the abysmal flness of life we choose to ignore.
Gaddis, winner of the National Book Award in 1976 and again in 1994 and the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship in 1982, died Wednesday at his home in East Hampton, N.Y. He was 75.
Deeply concerned with the values by which people live, Gaddis filled his work with fierce anger and bitter humor at how people fail themselves and others, at all forms of laziness and greed and stupidity.
Born in Manhattan on Dec. 29, 1922, Gaddis grew up in Massapequa, N.Y., a town that provided the model for the Long Island village "desecrated" by developers in "JR." His parents divorced when he was 3, and between the ages of 5 and 13 he attended boarding school.
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