A New York story - the neighbor I never met

I went upstairs to collect my mail today and there in the doorway was a bunch of yellow roses with a note saying "For James Purdy." I looked on the tenant list and there was a Purdy, but that told me little. So I went to the Times web site and searched his name and found this obituary:

James Purdy was a novelist and playwright, and he had broken his hip sometime in the past few months or weeks and was in a nursing home in New Jersey when he died, at 94.

The Times said: "Purdy, the author of the novels “Malcolm” and “The Nephew,” labored at the margins of the literary mainstream, inspiring veneration or disdain. His nearly 20 novels and numerous short stories and plays either enchanted or baffled critics with their gothic treatment of small-town innocents adrift in a corrupt and meaningless world, his distinctive blend of plain speech with ornate, florid locutions, and the hallucinatory quality of his often degraded scenes."

He was a pal of Paul Bowles and Dorothy Parker, who apparently made his reputation among writers with a review of his first book, "Malcolm," in Esquire. He never became a mainstream writer, though, and apparently was at peace with that on some level. He told an interviewer a few years ago, “I don’t think I’d like it if people liked me. I’d think that something had gone wrong.”

I feel an obligation now to track down his books and read them. Anyone know anything about him?