As indelible as the books of James Purdy are, it seems unlikely that their republication will gain him the kind of widespread posthumous embrace enjoyed by other cult authors. PHOTOGRAPH BY BEBETO MATTHEWS / AP

A couple of years ago, I mentioned James Purdy in passing, in an essay I was writing for a literary journal. When the proofs came back to me, I found that the copy editor had suggested that I delete Purdy’s name since, in her estimation, few of the journal’s readers were likely to be familiar with his work. I declined the suggestion but remain startled by its implication—that Purdy, always a proud outsider, had fallen so completely off the literary map that he was essentially unknown to even the most literate readers.

Like his near contemporaries Jean Stafford and Dawn Powell, Purdy has long had a small but vocal following that believes him worthy of a much wider readership. Born in Ohio, in 1914, Purdy began writing at an early age, but for years was unable to find a commercial publisher for his fiction. He turned to England, where he was taken up by Edith Sitwell, and there his first novel was published when he was forty-five. In the decades since, the case for Purdy has been made by Dorothy Parker, Gore Vidal, Susan Sontag, Paul Bowles, and, most recently, Jonathan Franzen. But none of them have quite succeeded, it seems, in lodging Purdy in the minds of very many readers.

Publishers have also sought to rekindle interest in Purdy’s work. A generation ago, it was the Black Sparrow Press which steadfastly kept his titles in print; in the middle of the last decade, Carroll & Graf put out new editions of several of his books. Now Liveright has taken up the cause. Last year they released a handsomely produced compendium of Purdy’s short stories, and this year they have republished three of Purdy’s novels: “Malcolm,” his 1959 début; “Cabot Wright Begins” (1964), and “Eustace Chisholm and the Works” (1967), which Franzen selected for the 2005 Clifton Fadiman Medal, a prize bestowed on the American novel deemed most worthy of rediscovery. As genuinely strange, unsettling, and indelible as these books are, it seems unlikely that their republication will gain Purdy, who died in 2009, the kind of widespread posthumous embrace enjoyed recently by another near contemporary, John Williams. On the contrary, a reading (or rereading) of these books—and the stories that preceded them—suggests that the very qualities that make Purdy’s works worth reviving are also the ones that will forever limit his potential audience. Unsparing, ambiguous, violent, and largely indifferent to the reader’s needs, Purdy’s fiction seems likely to remain an acquired taste. But it is a taste worth acquiring.

Purdy once said that he was drawn only to stories that “bristled with impossibilities.” In his novels and short fiction, possibility and potential are always compromised. There is neither transcendence nor transformation. His characters do not grow or develop; they dwindle and unravel. Purdy saw Hawthorne and Melville, “two other Calvinists,” as his literary antecedents, and it is not hard to interpret some of Purdy’s protagonists as latter-day incarnations of Billy Budd and Young Goodman Brown: guileless innocents abused by the world’s depraved sinners. “Malcolm,” along with the novella “63: Dream Palace,” is perhaps the book that most closely fits this mold. The title character is, by his own account, “a cypher and a blank,” completely ignorant of the ways of the world. A fifteen-year-old orphan with “an untouched appearance,” Malcolm lives in a palatial hotel, but on a dwindling inheritance. He passes his days sitting on a bench, waiting in vain for his father to return. One day, he is taken up by a mischievous passerby, an astrologer named Cox, who promises to introduce him to the wider world. “Give yourself up to things!” Cox insists. When Malcolm demurs, Cox taunts him: “You wish to remain on the bench. You prefer that to beginning.”

Malcolm finally relents and, in the following pages, is sent to a series of “addresses” where he encounters an array of oddballs and eccentrics, including a retired undertaker, a dwarf married to a former prostitute, and a billionaire named Girard Girard. The novel becomes a contest to see who among Mr. Cox’s “addresses” will succeed in possessing and ultimately defiling the young man. Purdy is often referred to as a symbolist, and one way to read “Malcolm” is as an unhinged allegory of accelerated adolescence, with debts to both “Pilgrim’s Progress” and “Alice in Wonderland.”

The plot, in any case, loosely parallels the story of Purdy’s own youth. Raised in a Bible-reading family in a small town in Ohio, Purdy was, by his own account, “brought up in a troubled atmosphere.” During the nineteen-twenties, his father suffered financial setbacks, his parents divorced, and he was shuttled among different relatives. He moved to Chicago as a teen-ager, “unprepared for its overwhelming confusion.” “Everything since then has been unreal,” he later wrote. In his twenties, after military service and studies at the University of Chicago, he began sending out his short stories. These stories were, he claimed, “always returned with angry, peevish, indignant rejections from the New York slick magazines, and they earned, if possible, even more hostile comments from the little magazines.” While in Chicago, Purdy was taken under the wing of the painter Gertrude Abercrombie, who ran a salon in her home that was fashioned after Gertrude Stein’s. Among the participants of the Abercrombie salon were some of the most important figures in the history of jazz: Sonny Rollins, Erroll Garner, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Max Roach, Miles Davis and Sarah Vaughan. Later, when Purdy moved to New York, it was the writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten who served as his mentor and facilitator.

Gertrude Abercrombie turns up in “Malcolm” in the form of Eloisa Brace, an artist who is married to an ex-con named Jerome. Brace’s house is full of black musicians rehearsing and putting on shows. Malcolm takes up residence there so that Brace can paint his portrait for Girard Girard’s wife, who has become besotted with the young man, seeing in him qualities her money can’t buy: juvenescence and innocence. Malcolm ends up being plucked off the street by a man on a motorcycle, who takes him to a club where he is introduced to a renowned singer named Melba (“America’s number one chanteuse”), who promptly decides she must marry him. Not long after, Malcolm dies of “acute alcoholism and sexual hypertension.”

Purdy was heavily influenced by black artists, drawn to the work of people who existed outside the white cultural mainstream. (Both Sitwell and the British novelist Angus Wilson, among others, were convinced on first reading Purdy’s work that the author himself was black.) In “Malcolm,” which was published almost a decade before Loving v. Virginia, the protagonist marries a powerful black woman. It’s a quiet transgression that can get lost amid Purdy’s louder ones.

Still, “Malcolm” is, by some criteria, a complete failure as a novel. Its protagonist is not fully human; none of the characters in the book are particularly recognizable. The ending is not only downbeat but unsatisfying. It doesn’t seem to have much of a point. (The book illustrates why Purdy fits uneasily into the slots we use to pigeonhole writers: he’s not a gay novelist per se, nor a social critic, though gay themes and social critique abound in his work.) The material feels unnervingly personal, as if the reader is peeping at the author’s nightmares. And yet “Malcolm,” like Purdy’s other work, is admirable for many of those very same qualities. It is the uncanny product of a singular vision, distinctly American and hard to refute. It is also extremely funny, much of the humor stemming from Malcolm’s innocence. When someone refers to Cox as “a pederast,” the boy takes it to be a synonym for “astrologer.” Later, when Jerome is trying to seduce Malcolm, he keeps asking the boy if he knows what an “ex-con” is. Malcolm doesn’t pick up on this euphemism for “sexual predator” until it’s almost too late. In Purdy’s work, the things we’d rather not know about are forever manifesting themselves, often uproariously.