Saturday, January 15, 2011

Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a novel, "Gadsby" without using letter 'E' in whole novel

Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a novel, "Gadsby", which contains over 50,000 words -- none of them with the letter E.

More info: Wright's primary difficulty was avoiding the "ed" suffix for past tense verbs. He also couldn't use any number from seven to twenty-nine. He avoided abbreviations like Mr. or Mrs. that, when expanded, would contain the letter E. 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

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