William Gaddis
[11][12] Carpenter's Gothic (1985) offered a shorter and more accessible picture of Gaddis's sardonic worldview, focusing on religious fundamentalism and apocalyptic thinking.Gaddis died at home in East Hampton, New York, of prostate cancer on December 16, 1998,[2] but not before creating his final work, Agapē Agape (the first word of the title is the Greek agapē, meaning divine, unconditional love), which was published in 2002, a novella in the form of the last words of a character similar but not identical to his creator.In May 1955 Gaddis eloped with Patsy Thompson Black (1928–2000), a model and actress who had come to New York from North Carolina to break into theater.Other authors who allude to Gaddis in their books include Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections), David Markson (Epitaph for a Tramp), Joseph McElroy (A Smuggler's Bible) and Stanley Elkin (The Magic Kingdom).[18] His life and work are the subject of a comprehensive website, The Gaddis Annotations, which has been noted in at least one academic journal as a superior example of scholarship using new media resources.The first book-length biography, Joseph Tabbi's Nobody Grew but the Business: On the Life and Work of William Gaddis, was published by Northwestern University Press in May 2015.His works have been translated into a number of foreign languages, including French, German, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Swedish, Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Russian.