Egad!

So, ever had a word you don't really like and found yourself working to avoid using it when you write something? Sometimes it may be easy, but if you happen to dislike a common word, or if the word you want to omit connects in some way to your subject, it would be kind of tough.

How about not wanting to use any words that have a particular letter in them? Even tougher, right? How about if that letter was the most commonly-appearing letter in the English language, "e?" That'd be very difficult for shorter works, but imagine you give yourself the task of writing a regular-length novel that completely leaves out that letter.

No need to imagine -- just find a copy somewhere of Edgar Vincent Wright's Gadsby, a 1939 novel whose 50,110 words do not contain a single "e." The only place Wright breaks his rule is in the introduction and obviously, considering his name, on the title page. He won't even use abbreviations if the original word contains an "e" when written out.

Such a work is called a lipogram, a kind of arbitrarily self-restricted writing that may constrain itself any number of ways. Wright's choice was to leave the fifth letter of the alphabet on the outside of his novel looking in, but other words may impose other rules on themselves. Perhaps no sentence can contain two words that start with the same letter, or perhaps every chapter will be required to leave out the same letter. A lipogram sentence may insist on including letters instead of leaving them out -- the test-your-typewriter-keys sentence "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs" is a liprogram that contains every letter of the alphabet at least once.

Wright's novel bears no relation to F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 The Great Gatsby except for the title characters' soundalike names. Copies are hard to come by, as a fire in a storage warehouse destroyed most of the first printing, and Wright himself died two months after its publication by the vanity press Wetzel Publishing Co. Apparently, decent-condition copies of this odd novel can run as much as $4,000.

Not bad for a book with only 25 letters.