Gadsby is a notorious book by Ernest Vincent Wright, circa 1939.
It is famous for consisting only of words not containing the letter 'e'. Gadsby is thus a lipogram, or a display of constraint in writing—a difficult art. It is 50,100 words long, and Wright's fourth book. Wright informs us in Gadsby's introduction of having had to impair his own writing contraption to avoid slipups.
Quoting from its initial paragraph, for a look into its mood:
"If youth, throughout all history, had a champion to stand up for it; to show a doubting world that a child can think; and, possibly, do it practically; you wouldn't constantly run across folks today who claim that "a child don't know anything." A child's brain starts functioning at birth; and has, amongst its many infant convolutions, thousands of dormant atoms, into which God has put a mystic possibility for noticing an adults act, and figuring out its purport."
This abundant utilization of punctuation and disjoint air go on throughout Gadsby in Wright's fight to accomplish his lipogram—it struck a fatal blow, though, as Wright would pass away on its day of publication.
Original work
