ABC Student News: Curious Facts

Gadsby: A Story of Over 50,000 Words without Using the Letter "E"

Gadsby: Champion of youth is a 1939 novel by Ernest Vincent Wright. The plot revolves around the dying fictional city of Branton Hills, which is revitalized thanks to the efforts of protagonist John Gadsby and a youth group he organizes.

The 136-page novel is written as a lipogram and does not include words that contain the letter "e". The novel's 50,110 words don't contain a single "e." In Gadsby's introduction Wright says his primary difficulty was avoiding the "-ed" suffix for past tense verbs. He focused on using verbs that don't take the -ed suffix and constructions with "do" (for instance "did walk" instead of "walked"). Scarcity of word options also drastically limited discussion involving quantity, pronouns, and many common words. Wright was unable to talk about any quantity between six and thirty. Wright used abbreviations on occasion, but only if the full form is similarly lipogrammatic, such as with "Dr.", and "P.S.". Wright "blacked" the E key of the typewriter with string, so as to forbid E-words that might slip in... and many did try to do so. Wright's book inspired other "lipogrammatic" works, including the famous novel A Void, which doesn't use the letter A.

Written by: Camila Vega