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He left college without a degree to work as a checker at The New Yorker. After the war, the young writer joined that restless group of expatriates who traveled to Mexico, Paris and Spain in search of experience and inexpensive living. Gaddis' varied background has served his fiction well, especially in JR. At present he is working on a western screenplay. "Every American writer," he insists, "has a western in him somewhere." But in a world that offers so many choices and distractions, the big problem, as Gaddis sees it, is "to decide what is worth doing."