Gadsby: A Lipogram Novel

Wright spent five and a half months writing Gadsby on a typewriter with the "e" key tied down so that it couldn't be used at all. A warehouse holding copies of Gadsby burned shortly after the book was printed, destroying most copies of the ill-fated novel. The book was never reviewed and only kept alive by the efforts of a few avant-garde intellos and assorted connoisseurs of the odd, weird and zany. But by word-of-mouth it has become an underground cult classic. The book's scarcity and oddness has in the past seen copies priced at $4,000 by book dealers. Over time, this peculiar masterpiece has had many curious readers open to this interestingly unusual reading experience.

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Ernest Vincent Wright (1873?-1939) was an American author. His most famous work is Gadsby, "A Story of Over 50,000 Words", which, except for the introduction and a note at the end, did not use the letter e. Every word was properly spelled and all narration was grammatically correct. Wright's passing away at 66 was within days or months of publication of Gadsby.