America’s Best Unknown Writer by Jonathan Raban | The New York Review of Books: Gaddis arrived in New York with a pile of pages that by March 1952 had grown to “almost 100,000 words,” or “just barely more than half finished.” For the winter of 1952–1953 he holed up in a borrowed farmhouse outside Montgomery, New York, emerging in the spring with a completed novel of around 500,000 words. By then, he had also signed a contract with Harcourt, Brace, and collected an advance of $1,000, which enabled him to work full-time on revising his enormous manuscript, and ditch his part-time job with the US Information Service, writing propaganda pieces for the magazine America Illustrated. That winter of hectic composition shows. For all its life, inventiveness, and seriousness of intent, The Recognitions is riddled with clumsy sentences to which an author in less haste would have mailed rejection slips. As Homer may sometimes nod, Gaddis can take disquietingly long naps.