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James Otis Purdy (July 17, 1914 March 13, 2009) was a controversial American novelist, short-story writer, poet, and playwright who, since his debut in 1956, published over a dozen novels, and many collections of poetry, short stories, and plays. His work has been translated into more than 30 languages and in 2013 his short stories were collected in ''The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy''. 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. Wilson, and both Jane Bowles and Paul Bowles. Purdy was the recipient of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Fiction Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1993) and was nominated for the 1985 PEN/Faulkner Award for his novel ''On Glory's Course'' (1984). In addition, he won two Guggenheim Fellowships (1958 and 1962), and grants from the Ford Foundation (1961), and Rockefeller Foundation. He worked as an interpreter and lectured in Europe with the United States Information Agency. ==Early life, education and early career== Purdy was born in Hicksville, Ohio, in 1914. His family moved to Findlay, Ohio, when he was about five years old, where he graduated from Findlay High School in 1932. Purdy's parents went through a separation and then a bitter divorce in 1930 after his father lost large sums of money in investments gone bad. His mother then converted their home in Findlay to a boardinghouse of which she was proprietress. Purdy earned a Bachelor of Arts teaching degree in French from Bowling Green State College in 1935, and taught French at the Greenbrier Military School in West Virginia. Then he studied at the University of Chicago, where he earned a master's degree in English in 1937. After serving in the U.S. Army, Purdy studied Spanish at the University of Chicago (1944–45).〔 He spent the summer of 1945 at the University of Puebla, Mexico, and taught English at the Ruston Academy in Havana, Cuba, in 1945–1946.〔 For the next nine and a half years, he taught Spanish at Lawrence College, in Appleton, Wisconsin.〔 In the mid-1950s, with encouragement and support from Miriam and Osborn Andreas and the Andreas Foundation (Archer Daniels Midland), Purdy returned to Chicago to pursue writing.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「James Purdy」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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