On 6 August 2015, the American author and playwright James Purdy left New York for the last time. “I don’t think there’s another American writer of such importance buried in Britain. Nearly everybody missed that.”However, it was Purdy’s next novel, Eustace Chisholm and the Works, that especially outraged the “pew-warmers”. The book, said Purdy, was about how “we rip out the beautiful things in us so we’ll be acceptable to society”. “Purdy got under the skin of America to something deep, universal and macabre.”What Purdy would think of the burial ceremony, and this revival of interest in his work, remains debatable.

Source: The Guardian March 11, 2019 15:11 UTC