James Purdy, a Fabulist Haunting the Fringes When he died in 2009, at 94, James Purdy was a forgotten man. He had always been a cult writer, held in almost worshipful regard for his wildly original, sometimes shocking novels and stories that worked the margins of American society, fringe territory populated by small-town folk, failed artists and tormented gay men. Over time, he made the transition from underrated to unread. The trajectory was steep. In his brief but brilliant heyday, from the late 1950s to the mid-"60s, he seemed poised to take a place in the literary front ranks. Susan Sontag, assessing his 1964 novel, "Cabot Wright Begins," for The New York Times Book Review, called him "indisputably one of the half-dozen or so living American writers worth taking seriously." That opinion was not eccentric. The backup chorus included Edith Sitwell, Angus Wilson, Dorothy Parker, Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal. Their combined voices failed to secure Mr. Purdy a permanent place in the mainstream. "His hope kept being deferred, the hope of being a major voice in American literature," said Paul W. Miller, a Purdy scholar now retired from Wittenberg University in Ohio. It never happened. Liveright Publishing, which reissued "Cabot Wright Begins," has just given Mr. Purdy what may be his last, best chance at a breakthrough. "The Complete Short Stories of James Purdy," released in July, gathers all 49 of his published stories, from "A Good Woman," which first appeared in the magazine Creative Writing in 1949, to "Reaching Rose," from the 2000 collection "Moe's Villa and Other Stories." It also includes five early unpublished stories, found in the Purdy papers at Yale - the earliest dating from the 1930s - and two recent stories that John Uecker, Mr. Purdy's literary executor, says the author deemed ready for publication. Robert Weil, the editor in chief of Liveright and a longtime Purdy fan, said: "I wanted to do something that would resurrect his career and secure him his rightful place in American letters. Otherwise, I felt he might be lost. "I thought it was worth a gamble to bring together all the stories known to exist," he added. It is a gamble. To read all of the stories and follow the arc of Mr. Purdy's career is to be reminded of how idiosyncratic, unpredictable and deeply strange an artist he was. These qualities drastically limited his readership, but they also make him a tantalizing figure for certain writers, notably Jonathan Franzen, and a hero for provocateurs like Tao Lin. John W. McCormack, a senior editor at the experimental literary magazine Conjunctions, said, "Someone that iconoclastic is always going to appeal to young writers." In her review of "Cabot Wright Begins," Sontag shrewdly identified at least three authorial identities: "Purdy the satirist and fantasist; Purdy the gentle naturalist of American, particularly small-town American, life; and Purdy the writer of vignettes or sketches, which give us a horrifying snapshot image of helpless people destroying each other." These multiple personalities made Purdy difficult to classify. "He had no antecedents," said Jerome Charyn, a fellow author at Arbor House in the 1970s. He came out of nowhere, singing. John Martin, who brought out a large collection of Purdy stories in 1991 when he ran Black Sparrow Press, puts Purdy in the same "dark category" as Paul Bowles, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers. "Purdy digs a bit deeper than those," he wrote in an e-mail. He takes more risks. He is more extreme. He added, "He is not afraid to push on until he fails, which he often does." Dwight Garner, in a review of the collected stories in The Times, called him "one of those American originals who is mostly more interesting to read about than to actually read." The "nowhere" that Mr. Purdy came from was the unforgettably named Hicksville, Ohio, where he was born in 1914, about a decade earlier than he let on. His difficult small-town boyhood in nearby Findlay, where he took nourishment from the tales that older relatives told, helped shape the sensibility that sent critics searching for a new label: Midwestern Gothic. In Chicago, where he moved after graduating from Bowling Green State University, he fell in with members of the Bohemian set around the painter Gertrude Abercrombie, many of them future jazz greats like Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach. As a writer, he earned more than his fair share of rejection. Like Dawn Powell, a fellow Ohioan, he was a Midwesterner trying to make inroads in New York. Adding to his sense of alienation, he was a gay man in a hostile straight society. His early work saw the light of day only when a couple of well-to-do patrons arranged for private printings of his stories. His first commercial publication came in Britain rather than the United States. Mr. Purdy nevertheless had his moment. In the late 1950s and early "60s, his stories appeared in top-shelf journals like Partisan Review, Commentary, Esquire and The New Yorker. His publisher, Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, was already becoming synonymous with high-quality fiction. His first full-length novel, "Malcolm," published in 1959, was later adapted by Edward Albee for the Broadway stage. He was a rising star. Success proved elusive, though, and Mr. Purdy did little to advance his cause. "Cabot Wright Begins," a scathing take on New York's literary culture, included a merciless sendup of Orville Prescott, a book critic for The Times. "Eustace Chisholm and the Works," about the doomed relationship between a repressed gay man and one of the innocent Billy Budd figures that turn up frequently in Mr. Purdy's fiction, failed to find an audience. Its graphic description of an abortion, and its horrific, sadomasochistic resolution, made it a difficult read. Publishers dropped Mr. Purdy. He could not find an agent. "Given his personality as an artist, it was inevitable that he would be isolated from the literary mainstream," said David Means, a short-story writer who sought out Mr. Purdy in the "80s. "When you write a long, strange book, and call it "The House of the Solitary Maggot," you can't shoot for the stars." By the late "70s, Mr. Purdy had settled into the role of the prince in exile from a literary kingdom he held in contempt. It was in this period that Fran Lebowitz met him, at his invitation, for a cup of coffee on Hudson Street. "It was summertime, and he was wearing a seersucker suit," she recalled. He was very old-fashioned in his manner, very courtly, very proper in his dress. It was very apparent to me that he had no money. The two became friends. From time to time, Ms. Lebowitz arranged readings for him. "He had so much unpublished work, and this was the only way to hear it," she said. But he was a terrible reader. He did not make any concessions to the fact that people wanted to hear. He did not make any concessions, period. That, to me - in addition to the carrying of grudges - is the definition of character. Small awards and grants came his way, along with the occasional accolade, like the lifetime achievement award that The Antioch Review, with whom he had a long history, gave him in 2001. The ceremony was bittersweet, and emblematic of Mr. Purdy's predicament. "I met him at the National Arts Club," said Robert S. Fogarty, the editor of the review. He was lamenting the fact that he couldn't get a publisher in the United States.