Public policy, social issues, gender politics, religion, civitas, and other taboo topics fall under the hammer of Shava's iconoclasmic force of natural philosophy.
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50,000 words without using the letter E
Tuesday, February 25, 2003
10:38 PM
OK, so some of the lists I'm on get into serious odd trivia...
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At 06:00 PM 2/25/2003, [a friend] wrote:
>nancy wants to know if you ever wrote a book with no use of the letter
>e...is that true or was it somebody else or was it just an essay or is a
>total literary urban myth?
Urban myth, I guess. I've heard that some Frenchman did it,
but never by anyone who cd remember the name of
the alleged author....
Anybody else?
friend@site.com
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Many of my friends call me The Information Ferret. I love google, but I'll use other sources, and I adore a good research library.
Still this sounded like a fun thing to pursue.
Well I found this:
from philobiblon.com:
Lipograms . . .
Interesting ideas can be generated by prohibiting a particular letter from being used in a work. This is called a 'lipogram.' The first lipogram book in English was Gadsby written by Ernest Vincent Wright in 1939. Georges Perec of the Oulipo group wrote the lipogram novel A void which tells a story in 200 pages without using the letter 'e.' For a humorous example, read "Mary Had a Lipogram" reprinted in Making the alphabet dance by Ross Eckler.
and another reference:
from www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek:
A few daring writers have even deliberately reduced the richness of English by taking something out. How about taking out something that appears quite often, like the letter "e"? Of all the twenty-six letters of the English alphabet, "e" appears most frequently. To write even a paragraph without using "e" taxes one's ingenuity, but how about a whole novel without even one "e"? That novel idea certainly seems hopeless.
Ernest Vincent Wright managed to do just that in his novel Gadsby, A Story of Over 50,000 Words Without Using the Letter "E", Wetzel Publishing Co., Inc. 1939. [The "E" in quotes doesn't count, nor does the fact that the author's name contains "e" three times.]
Wright claims, in his introduction, that "this story was written with the E type-bar of the typewriter tied down..." [Appearances of "e" in the book's introduction don't count either.]
and in confirmation, alibris.com has one copy available.
So, I'd say it's real! Truly odd.
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