Bruce Duffy was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Irish American parents. His novels include The World as I Found It and Last Comes the Egg. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award. He lives in Maryland. David Leavitt is the author of several novels, including The Body of Jonah Boyd, While England Sleeps, and most recently, The Indian Clerk. A recipient of fellowships from both the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, he teaches at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
“The World As I Found It is both thought-provoking and hard to put
down—a good read. It should be fascinating not only to Wittgenstein
buffs, but to anyone who is curious about the ways philosophy and
life both arise from each other and wage war on each other.”
—Vicki Hearne
“Bruce Duffy's novel The World As I Found It, published in 1987,
was one of the more astonishing literary debuts in recent memory.
In defiance of common practice, Mr. Duffy gave the world not a
tender, autobiographical coming-of-age story or a slim collection
of finely wrought tales of family dysfunction but more than 500
pages of dazzling language and dizzying speculation on the life of
Ludwig Wittgenstein.”
—A.O. Scott, The New York Times
“A novel constructed out of the lives, thoughts, appetites, egos,
the very toenails and pocketwatches of Wittgenstein, Bertrand
Russell, and G.E. Moore . . . astonishing.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Duffy has sustained a miracle. A rich, eloquent, poised masterwork
that succeeds beyond one’s most generous expectations.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“By turns wicked, melancholy, and rhapsodic, The World As I Found
It is an astonishing performance, a kind of intellectual opera in
which each abstraction gets its own artist.”
—Newsday
“It is hard to know which is the more outsized—the talent of Bruce
Duffy or his nerve. Duffy is a superb writer.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Bruce Duffy’s dazzling first novel, The World As I Found It blends
fact and fiction in a story based on the unlikely figure of
philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and his idiosyncratic quest for
meaning in what he saw as the 20th century's chamber of
horrors.”
—United Press International, November 1988
“Bruce Duffy . . . turned Wittgenstein’s life into fresh,
intelligent fiction.”
—Caryn James, The New York Times
“Stunning, bold first novel very loosely based on the erratic
career of Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein . . . Duffy has
concocted letters, rearranged biography, toyed with language and
philosophy, and come up with an idiosyncratic tale that, line after
line, crackles with sharp wit. A spectacular first showing.”
—Kirkus
“This brilliant fiction could be mistaken for a racy biography of
Wittgenstein, although it is only a broadly accurate account of the
man. Duffy writes as memorably about sex and trench warfare as
about philosophy.”
—Austin MacCurtain, The Sunday Times (London)
“Bruce Duffy’s superb novel The World As I Found It, based on the
life of Ludwig Wittgenstein, another seminal modern figure whose
sexual life is handled circumspectly and who is also a guilt-ridden
participant in the Great War.”
—Leslie Epstein, The New York Times
“A ‘sweeping arrangement of fact and fancy’ about the philosopher
Ludwig Wittgenstein.”
—George Johnson, The New York Times
“Abundant with life and almost unflaggingly interesting . . . The
enigmatic Wittgenstein could imagine the unimaginable, but never
would he have imagined it possible that he would one day appear as
the protagonist of a novel and a delightful one, at that.”
—Publishers Weekly
“. . . readers who like a broad canvas will find this work
appealing, moving as it does from uppercrust Vienna to pre-war
Cambridge to the battlefields of World War I and World War II . . .
compelling.”
—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal
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