When Ernest Vincent Wright published his novel Gadsby in 1939, it was an immediate sensation. The plot centers around the life of a man who is committed to transforming his community through its young people.

It wasn’t the plot that initially captured the public’s attention, however. It had much more to do with the fact that the entire 50,000-word novel was written without making use of the letter “e”.

This literary device, by the way, where the author intentionally omits certain letters, is known as a lipogram. A lipogram is the opposite of a pangram, which is addressed in detail in this post.

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