Gadsby

Gadsby is a novel by Ernest Vincent Wright, published in 1939. It is written without words that contain the letter E, the most common letter in the English language, and a work that deliberately avoids certain letters is called a lipogram.

The book is a complete story of over fifty thousand words, and the first edition carries a subtitle on its title page and cover describing that feat. Later reprints sometimes drop the subtitle altogether.

Its plot concerns the dying fictional city of Branton Hills, which is revitalised through the efforts of John Gadsby and a youth organiser. The constraint on the prose is therefore imposed on a story about civic improvement rather than on a story about language.

Wright explains in his introduction, which is not part of the story and does contain the letter, that his main difficulty was avoiding the -ed ending for past-tense verbs. The book was vanity published and little noticed in its own time, and it has since become a favourite among readers interested in constrained writing.