J R is a novel by William Gaddis published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1975. In the story, a schoolboy secretly amasses a fortune in penny stocks. J R won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1976. It was Gaddis' first novel since the 1955 publication of The Recognitions.
To complete the novel, Gaddis received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Excerpts of the work were published in The Dutton Review, Antaeus, and Harper's magazine. (June 1975) (This is listed on the copyright page of the novel, I don't know how to cite that)
Synopsis
J R tells the story of the eponymous J R Vansant, an 11-year-old schoolboy who obscures his identity through payphone calls and postal money orders in order to parlay penny stock holdings into a fortune on paper. The novel broadly satirizes what Gaddis called "the American dream turned inside out". One critic called it "the greatest satirical novel in American literature." Novelist Louis Auchincloss thought it "worthy of Swift."
Literary analysis
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