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J R is a novel by William Gaddis published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1975. It was the author's second published book, twenty years after his first, and it won the annual U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
J R tells the story of the eponymous J R Vansant, an 11-year-old schoolboy who obscures his identity through payphone calls and postal money orders in order to parlay penny stock holdings into a fortune on paper. The novel broadly satirizes what Gaddis called "the American dream turned inside out".[2] One critic called it "the greatest satirical novel in American literature."[3] Novelist Louis Auchincloss thought it "worthy of Swift."
