William Gaddis

Gaddis grew up largely apart from his parents, shuttled through a Connecticut boarding school as a child before Harvard, which expelled him after a bar brawl. He supported himself for years with corporate writing and public-relations jobs while composing fiction that mercilessly satirized exactly that world.

The Recognitions, his 976-page debut about an art forger truer to his fakes than the art world is to anything genuine, sold poorly and was savaged by most reviewers in 1955, though a small circle of writers recognized it as a landmark. J R, an almost entirely dialogue-driven satire of American finance, won the National Book Award two decades later, followed by a second NBA for A Frolic of His Own.

Long unread outside a devoted cult following, he is now considered one of American postmodernism's essential architects. He died in East Hampton, New York, in 1998.