A. Lincoln Gillespie, Jr
A. Lincoln Gillespie, Jr., often referred to as Link or Lincoln, was an American writer and a noted figure in the avant-garde literary scene of the early 20th century. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, he graduated with a degree in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1918 and began his career as a high school math teacher. A life-altering car accident led him to relocate to Paris with his wife, where he became immersed in the American expatriate community on the Left Bank. Embracing an eccentric persona, Gillespie was influenced by contemporary writers such as James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, leading him to experiment with language in innovative ways. His writings often defied conventional grammar and syntax, resulting in works that critics sometimes found incoherent or overly avant-garde. Gillespie contributed to the experimental magazine *transition* and saw some success in literary circles before his health declined due to tuberculosis. He eventually returned to the U.S., where he spent his later years in Philadelphia and New York, publishing very little until his death in 1950. His life and work reflect a unique intersection of creativity, eccentricity, and the struggles of a writer navigating the complexities of modernist literature.
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Subject Terms
A. Lincoln Gillespie, Jr.
Poet
- Born: 1895
- Died: 1950
Biography
Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Abraham Lincoln Gillespie, Jr.—Link or Lincoln to his friends—attended the University of Pennsylvania, earning a degree in mathematics in 1918. He taught math as a high-school teacher for more than four years until a serious automobile accident left him critically injured. His recovery was slow, and his injuries would haunt him for the rest of his life. In hopes travel abroad might provide opportunities for improving his health, Gillespie and his wife relocated to Paris. Soon they became part of the American expatriate community of the Left Bank.
Almost from the time he moved to Paris, Gillespie styled himself as an eccentric and an artist. He spread so many stories about himself that it is at times difficult to separate the factual from the apocryphal. One such story is that an acquaintance mentioned to Gillespie that he resembled Irish expatriate and modernist writer James Joyce, and that as a result of the remark Gillespie decided to become a writer. Like Joyce and American expatriate Gertrude Stein, Gillespie focused on experimental language in writing, decidedly placing himself among the avant-garde.
In 1927, he submitted a number of his vignettes and articles to Elliot Paul, an editor at the experimental magazine transition [sic]; although Paul seemed to consider Gillespie’s work more entertaining for its bravado and posturing than for any inherent literary or aesthetic worth, he nevertheless accepted a number of pieces from Gillespie over the next five years. Ever playing the part of the eccentric writer, Gillespie is even said to have separated from his wife because she could no longer appreciate his genius and intellect.
Gillespie believed that the rules of syntax, grammar, spelling, and punctuation placed unnatural limits on a writer’s ability to communicate; he even went so far as to say that a writer’s ideas were in part corrupted and transformed due to the distorting restraints of grammar and sentence structure. His works, then, like “Textighter Eye-Ploy or Hothouse Bromidick?” (1928), “Revolution of the Word Proclamation” (1929), and “Amerikaka Ballet” (1929), tended at times to be a mishmash of unrelated phonetically spelled terms, phrases, and images that were largely incoherent in terms of any larger context. As a result, Gillespie’s works in transition were often singled out for lampooning by critics of the more extremist tendencies of the literary modernism movement.
Gillespie would nourish his slight reputation by placing a pair of articles in the experimental anthology Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine in 1931 and return to the United States in 1932. He spent time in the literary circles of both Philadelphia and New York, but published very little in his later years. After a long and debilitating fight with tuberculosis, he died in 1950.