Bruce Duffy, "an ambitious, inventive writer whose debut novel, The World as I Found It--with its improbable leading man, the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein--received rapturous reviews but nevertheless failed to make him a lasting literary star," died February 10, the New York Times reported. He was 70. For all the praise he received in his mid-30s, Duffy "produced only three novels, with long gaps between the publication of each--the fruits of a career in which he wrote mainly on the side while earning a living as a security guard, corporate consultant and speechwriter."
On Salon.com in 1999, more than a decade after it was published, Joyce Carol Oates named The World as I Found It one of the five greatest nonfiction novels and "one of the most ambitious first novels ever published."
Duffy was recognized in 1988 as a Guggenheim Fellow and received the Whiting Award, for emerging writers, in fiction, but "a decade would pass before he produced a follow-up novel," Last Comes the Egg (1997), and it was "14 more years before he reimagined another esoteric subject, in Disaster Was My God: A Novel of the Outlaw Life of Arthur Rimbaud (2011)," the Times wrote.
Although neither novel was a bestseller, Kate Duffy said her father was not dismayed: "Writing was his passion, a drive that took over everything for him. Whatever disappointment he felt, he just started another novel."
The World as I Found It received new life in 2010 when New York Review Books reissued it as a classic after it had gone out of print. Edwin Frank, NYRB editorial director, said: "It is a serious novel about the grip of ideas and a historical novel executed with a very personal and remarkably light touch. Bruce's book typically drives philosophers bats, by the way--another thing that recommends it."
Duffy had completed American Humdinger, a historical novel about the creation of the atomic bomb, the Times noted, but when he couldn't find an agent to sell it, he "gave up and started a new one, which was unfinished at his death."