David Markson (December 20, 1927 – c. June 4, 2010) was an American novelist, born David Merrill Markson in Albany, New York. He was the author of several postmodern novels, including Springer's Progress, Wittgenstein's Mistress, and Reader's Block. His final book, The Last Novel, was published in 2007 and received a positive review in the New York Times, which called it "a real tour de force."
Markson's work is characterized by an unconventional approach to narrative and plot. The writer David Foster Wallace hailed Wittgenstein's Mistress as "pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country." While his early works draw on the modernist tradition of William Faulkner and Malcolm Lowry, his later novels are, in Markson's words, "literally crammed with literary and artistic anecdotes" and "nonlinear, discontinuous, collage-like, an assemblage."
In addition to his output of modernist and postmodernist experimental literature, he has published a book of poetry, a critical study of Malcolm Lowry, three crime novels, and what's been called an anti-Western.
The movie Dirty Dingus Magee, starring Frank Sinatra, is based on Markson's anti-Western, The Ballad of Dingus Magee.
Read more about David Markson: Biography, Wittgenstein's Mistress, Late Novels, Bibliography, Further Reading
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“You must get your living by loving. But as it is said of the merchants that ninety-seven in a hundred fail, so the life of men generally, tried by this standard, is a failure, and bankruptcy may be surely prophesied.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)