James Purdy, fiction writer, poet, dramatist, and visual artist, died March 13 in Englewood, N.J., according to the New York Times. Purdy wrote nearly twenty novels and many short stories and plays, work that was greatly admired by the likes of Tennessee Williams, Dorothy Parker, Angus Wilson, and John Cowper Powys, along with Gore Vidal, who proclaimed him “an authentic American genius.” In a review of Children Is All, a collection of stories and plays, Edith Sitwell wrote that Mr. Purdy would “come to be recognized as one of the greatest living writers of fiction in our language.” Edward Albee adapted Mr. Purdy’s novel Malcolm for the stage. Critics were not always as supportive; characteristically, however, Mr. Purdy seemed to take this in stride. “I don’t think I’d like it if people liked me,” he told one interviewer. “I’d think that something had gone wrong.” He was 94.