GADSBY

Ernest Vincent Wright’s 1939 novel Gadsby is over 50,000 words long, yet doesn’t contain a single letter “e” anywhere other than the cover. In order to prevent himself from accidentally using the letter “e”, he disabled the key on his typewriter by tying it down. Gadsby tells the story of a fictional city called Branton Hills, which is revitalized as a result of the efforts of its new mayor, John Gadsby. As to his motivation for writing Gadsby, Wright first thought to try writing a book without the letter ‘e’ after learning that the letter “e” supposedly occurs in books and other writings on average about five times more often than any other letter in English