Gil Orlovitz wrote in 1957 that "Too much verse is written about phenomena. My intent is to make the phenomena one of the symbols." Rather than writing about experience, Orlovitz made words themselves the experience. It was this very practice that was both his undoing and his lasting success, for while it alienated him from popular audiences all his life, it did establish him as a noteworthy innovator in the novel, anticipating developments made respectable in the 1960s and the 1970s by such writers as Ronald Sukenick, Gilbert Sorrentino, William H. Gass, and even by such popularly successful authors as Donald Barthelme, Richard Brautigan, and Kurt Vonnegut.

Orlovitz was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on 7 June 1918. He attended Temple University and then Columbia University in New York, where he worked most of his life as editor and free-lance television writer, with one period in Hollywood as a screenwriter for Columbia...