James Purdy, 94, cutting-edge writer

NEW YORK - Author James Purdy, a shocking realist and surprising romantic who in underground classics such as

Cabot Wright Begins

and

Eustace Chisholm and the Works

inspired censorious outrage and lasting admiration, has died.

Spokesman Walter Vatter of Ivan Dee Publishers said Mr. Purdy had been in poor health and died yesterday morning at Englewood Hospital in New Jersey. According to his literary agency, Harold Ober Associates, he was 94.

Mr. Purdy published poetry, drawings, the plays Children Is All and Enduring Zeal, the novels Mourners Below and Narrow Rooms, and the collection Moe's Villa and Other Stories. Much of his work fell out of print; several books were reissued in recent years. In the spring, Ivan Dee will issue a collection of his plays.

Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams and Dorothy Parker were among his fans, but Mr. Purdy won few awards and was little known to the general public. He spent most of his latter years in a one-room Brooklyn walk-up, bitterly outside what he called "the anesthetic, hypocritical, preppy and stagnant New York literary establishment."

He was attacked for his "adolescent and distraught mind," accused of writing "fifth-rate, avant-garde soap opera," and left out of the country's official literary establishment - the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was also called a comic genius worthy of Voltaire and an outlaw, in the best sense, among his compromised peers.

Interviewed by the Associated Press in 2005, Mr. Purdy recalled being "exposed to everything" as a child, and his books revealed the most detailed awareness of sex, violence, race, class, familial cruelty and romantic longing. His work was labeled "gothic" for its extremes of emotion and physicality, but in his own mind, there was no sensationalism, just the impulse to write what he knew.

"When you're writing, at least in my case, you're so occupied by the story and the characters that you have no interest in what people may think or whether I should write to please anyone," he said.

Mr. Purdy was born in Fremont, Ohio. His parents split up when he was young, and he alternated among the homes of his mother, father and a grandmother. His formal education was essentially a waste, although Sunday school did impart an appreciation of the King James Bible. An early muse was a landlady to whom he wrote hate letters. "My mother was both horrified and amused that I would write these terrible things about real people," he said, adding with a laugh, "We never showed them to the landlady. She might have had a stroke."

In his 20s, he submitted some stories to what he called "the New York slick magazines," which duly rejected them in "rage." A break came in his early 1930s when he was introduced to Chicago businessman and literary critic Osborn Andreas, who privately published a story collection, Don't Call Me by My Right Name.

Others soon learned about him, including British writers Dame Edith Sitwell and Angus Wilson, and his official debut, 63: Dream Palace, came out in 1956. He followed with such novels as The Nephew, Malcolm, and Cabot Wright Begins, stories of innocent young men, needy older women, and, in the case of Cabot Wright, literary elitism, sexual violence and indiscreet bodily noises.

His most influential novel, Eustace Chisholm and the Works, was published in 1967 to knee-jerk repulsion and eventual acclaim as a landmark of gay fiction. Set in Depression-era Chicago, Chisholm is a 20th-century Satyricon, an explicit, matter-of-fact portrait of abortion, disembowelment and "diurnal coitus." But it's also, through the passion of two men, a quest for "that rare thing: the authentic, naked, unconcealed voice of love."

By 2005, the novel was respected, and respectable enough to receive the Clifton Fadiman Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

Presenting the award to an an ailing Mr. Purdy at a Manhattan ceremony, novelist Jonathan Franzen said, "The extreme margins of the stable, familiar world of Saul Bellow - and of most novelists, including me - are at the extreme normal end of Mr. Purdy's world. He takes up where the rest of us leave off."