The Misfit

Born in 1914, Purdy grew up in Defiance County, Ohio, a locale (and name) that could have come from his fiction. He was raised by business-minded Protestant parents whose family wealth disappeared suddenly in his adolescence. Though he wasn’t at all unloved or overly preached-at, he clearly reveled in leaving this small-town world behind him for 1930s Chicago, where he moved after attending college. There he became close friends with a number of artists, including the writer Wendell Wilcox and the bohemian socialite Gertrude Abercrombie, a painter and key supporter of jazz musicians like Charlie Parker. Purdy was writing by then, composing the stories that would eventually make his name, but he was also basking in the first metropolitan scenes he’d ever known. Throughout his career, his focus would fluctuate between the town and the city: His first two books, 63: Dream Palace and Malcolm, were nocturnal urban fantasies, while his third, The Nephew, ended up as a small-town tale.