Ernest Vincent Wright

Ernest Vincent Wright (1872–1939) was an American author remembered for a single curiosity, Gadsby, a novel of about fifty thousand words written without the letter E and published in 1939, a few months before his death. Little is recorded of his life: he was born in Massachusetts, attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a time, served in the navy, and published three earlier small books, including The Wonderful Fairies of the Sun and The Fairies That Run the World and How They Do It. He wrote Gadsby, he said, with the E key of his typewriter tied down, as a demonstration that the letter was not indispensable.