Now available for pre-order from amazon.com, The Letters of William Gaddis will be published on 7 March 2013 by the Dalkey Archive Press. Edited by Steven Moore and with an afterword by Sarah Gaddis (the author’s daughter), the book will constitute something of an autobiography, as the publisher’s description notes:

Now recognized as one of the giants of postwar American fiction, William Gaddis (1922–98) shunned the spotlight during his life, which makes this collection of his letters a revelation. Beginning in 1930 when Gaddis was at boarding-school and ending in September 1998, a few months before his death, these letters function as a kind of autobiography, and are all the more valuable because Gaddis was not an autobiographical writer. Here we see him forging his first novel The Recognitions (1955) while living in Mexico, fighting in a revolution in Costa Rica, and working in Spain, France, and North Africa. Over the next twenty years he struggles to find time to write the National Book Award-winning J R (1975) amid the complications of work and family; deals with divorce and disillusionment before reviving his career with Carpenter’s Gothic (1985); then teaches himself enough about the law to indite A Frolic of His Own (1994), which earned him another NBA. Returning to a topic he first wrote about in the 1940s, he finishes his last novel Agapē Agape as he lay dying.

The Gaddis Annotations Web site also notes that, further down the road, Joseph Tabbi is working on a biography of the author for Northwestern University Press, William Gaddis: A Literary Life, which is “expected to be ready in late 2013.”

I’ve written about Gaddis in the past here.