The 50,000 Word Novel That Doesn’t Contain the Letter “E”
Ernest Vincent Wright’s 1939 novel Gadsby is over 50,000 words long.
There is nothing remarkable about that.
What makes this novel noteworthy is that it doesn’t contain a single letter “e”
anywhere other than the cover.
Given that ‘e’ is the most commonly used letter in English, you might think this would
have been impossible, but Wright stated this wasn’t nearly as limiting as one might think.
For instance, about half of the top 500 most commonly used words in English were still
available to him to use.
That’s not to say it was easy.
Among the more difficult aspects of writing such a work, Wright had to avoid all “-ed”
endings as well as the word “the”.
Beyond that, he had to come up with clever, non-awkward ways to refer to certain things,
such as a ‘Turkey’, which he called a “Thanksgiving National Bird”, and “wedding
cake”, which was changed to “an astonishing loaf of culinary art”.
He wrote the book in just under six months starting in 1936 and finishing in February
of 1937.
In order to prevent himself from accidentally using the letter ‘e’, he disabled the
key on his typewriter by tying it down.
As to his motivation for writing Gadsby, he first thought to try writing a book without
the letter ‘e’ after learning that the letter ‘e’ supposedly occurs in books
and other writings on average about five times more often than any other letter in English.
He further became excited about the idea after discussing the matter with various people
and having everyone tell him that it couldn’t be done unless one threw out grammar and made
a habit of creating awkward sentences.
After completing the novel, he wrote: “As I wrote along, in long-hand at first,
a whole army of little E’s gathered around my desk, all eagerly expecting to be called
upon.
But gradually as they saw me writing on and on, without even noticing them, they grew
uneasy; and, with excited whisperings amongst themselves, began hopping up and riding on
my pen, looking down constantly for a chance to drop off into some word; for all the world
like seabirds perched, watching for a passing fish!
But when they saw that I had covered 138 pages of typewriter size paper, they slid onto the
floor, walking sadly away, arm in arm; but shouting back: “You certainly must have
a hodge-podge of a yarn there without *us*!
Why, man!
We are in every story ever written *hundreds of thousands of times!
This is the first time we ever were shut out!”
He was unable to find a publishing house willing to publish Gadsby, so after two years, he
sought out a vanity publisher to self-publish it, settling on Wetzel Publishing Co. in Los
Angeles.
Unfortunately for him, two things happened to stop the book from becoming widely published
or even reviewed at all.
First, the fact that there was a fire at Wetzel’s warehouse, which resulted in not only a firefighter
losing his life in the blaze, but also the vast majority of the copies of Gadsby being
destroyed.
The second thing that happened was Wright himself died just two months after publishing
the book at the age of 67.
With no one left to promote it and few copies in existence, it faded into obscurity for
a time, but has gained in popularity over the years.
Today Gadsby is considered something of a classic, albeit in the “oddity” category,
rather than for its literative qualities.
Nevertheless, thanks to its notoriety and scarcity, a first edition copy of Gadsby,
even one in poor condition, tends to cost around $4,000-$5,000.
Bonus Facts: • Gadsby wasn’t the only classic not to
be appreciated in its time.
Moby Dick only sold 3000 copies over a 40 year span (during the author, Herman Melville’s,
lifetime), making Melville only $556.37.
It was also largely overlooked critically.
• Works like Gadsby are called lipograms.
A lipogram is basically just a form of writing where the author purposefully excludes a letter
or symbol from their text.
‘Lipogram’ comes from the Greek ‘leipográmmatos’, more or less meaning “leaving a letter out”.
Another type of lipogram is a pangrammatic lipogram.
This is where you write something (usually something very short, like a single sentence)
that includes every letter of the alphabet, except one.
• Little is known of Ernest Wright beyond some details surrounding Gadsby and that he
wrote three other books, The Wonderful Fairies of the Sun in 1896, The Fairies That Run the
World and How They Do It in 1903, and Thoughts and Reveries of an American Bluejacket in
1918.
He also wrote a comedic poem that became mildly popular, “When Father Carves the Duck”.
As to what he did with the rest of his life, there are conflicting accounts.
He was either English or American, and may or may not have been in the navy or otherwise
a sailor.
It is known that he attended M.I.T.’s School of Mechanic Arts, which had a two year program
for high school students.
Instead of taking normal high school classes, this program focused on educating teens with
practical skills like metallurgy, carpentry, and the like.
It isn’t known whether he graduated though, because they listed him as a “special student”
in his second year and no direct record of him graduating exists.
• Georges Perec published a 250 page book, La Disparition, in French which also doesn’t
contain the letter ‘e’.
This book was later translated into English.
The English translation conformed to the same restriction as the French version, lacking
any instance of the letter ‘e’.