Gaddis was born in Manhattan on Dec. 29, 1922, grew up in Massapequa, N.Y., and went to boarding school in Connecticut and Farmingdale High School on Long Island. He studied English literature at Harvard University, and wrote stories, poems, essays and reviews for the Harvard Lampoon. In his senior year, he was asked to resign from the college after he and a friend were involved in an altercation with the police. . . .
In New York, he worked as a fact checker at The New Yorker, and spent his free time in Greenwich Village with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and other writers of the Beat Generation. Leaving New York, he traveled through Mexico and Central America, joining insurgents in Costa Rica during a brief civil war. Subsequently he went to Spain and Africa, gathering experience and material while working on "The Recognitions." . . .
The title character of "JR" is an 11-year-old who becomes a wizard of Wall Street. In a Paris Review interview, Gaddis explained why the character was so young. "He is in this prepubescent age where he is amoral" and "dealing with people who are immoral, unscrupulous," he said, "whereas his good cheer and greed he considers perfectly normal."
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)