William Wharton, an Expressionist painter who launched a new career as a novelist in his 50s and won an American Book Award for his first novel, "Birdy," has died. He was 82.
Wharton, who had been in failing health for some time, died Wednesday at Scripps Memorial Hospital in Encinitas, north of San Diego, said his wife of 58 years, Rosemary.
The Philadelphia-born Wharton was 53 and making his living as an artist in Paris under his birth name, Albert du Aime, when "Birdy" was published by Knopf in 1979.
A highly original novel, "Birdy" opens in an Army hospital ward at the end of World War II. There, a young soldier who has been emotionally shattered by the horrors of combat retreats so much into the safer world of the birds he raised as a youth that he actually believes he is a bird. "Birdy" won the American Book Award for first novel and was a Pulitzer Prize runner-up for fiction.
"Only the most rigorous imagination can make a story of this sort work for a reader who is generally indifferent to birds," wrote Newsweek magazine reviewer Peter S. Prescott. "Wharton has just such an imagination."
Rosalie Siegel, Wharton's agent since she sold "Birdy" to Knopf, said that when she first read the manuscript, "I thought it was an amazing novel with a very original voice. It just swept all of New York publishing off its feet initially and was a sensation upon publication."
"Birdy," which became a national bestseller, was made into a 1984 film starring Nicolas Cage and Matthew Modine.
Two other Wharton novels also became movies: "Dad," the story of three generations of the men in one family, and "A Midnight Clear," a World War II story of a Christmastime encounter between a small group of Germans who would like to surrender to a squadron of GIs holed up in an abandoned chateau in the Ardennes Forest during the Battle of the Bulge.
Wharton was known for closely guarding his privacy, which is why he chose to use a pseudonym for his writing. (William Wharton is derived from his middle name and his mother's maiden name.)
"My private life means a lot to me, and one of the best ways I could think of to protect [it] is to write under a pseudonym," he told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1992.
Or, as he told the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel in 1995: "In France, I'm just a crazy painter who lives on a boat, but I didn't want to become an American celebrity, even a small literary one."
