Gadsby: Champion Of Youth

Gadsby: Champion of Youth is a work of fiction that puts forth an account of goings on in a fictitious city, "Branton Hills." It primarily has to do with a transformation, through youth's vigor, of this moribund and slothful community. John Gadsby, its protagonist—a man of fifty or so—calls upon his town's girls and boys to aid him in his plan to bring activity and vitality back to that vicinity.

Thrust onward by a can-do spirit, this organization campaigns for original civic construction, and Gadsby soon gains a post as mayor.

“	If youth, throughout all history, had a champion to stand up for it; to show a doubting world that a child can think; and, possibly, do it practically; you wouldn't constantly run across folks today who claim that "a child don't know anything." A child's brain starts functioning at birth; and has, amongst its many infant convolutions, thousands of dormant atoms, into which God has put a mystic possibility for noticing an adult's act, and figuring out its purport.	”
—Gadsby, first paragraph

So what is so important about this?

I know you did not notice that up till now, the letter 'e' did not appear in any of the words or sentences above. That was the primary significance of the story.

Wikipedia says:

'This story of about 50,000 words is most famous as a notably ambitious lipogram, in that it painstakingly omits a most common glyph from all of its paragraphs. Gadsby is famous for its particular innovation: for all its 50,110 words, it is a long lipogram, a composition avoiding a particular glyph throughout.

A lipogram is a form of artistic constraint that arbitrarily limits an author's vocabulary. Gadsby, skips from "d" to "f" in its vocabulary of around 4,000 valid words... '.

In his introduction to the book, the author, Ernest Vincent Wright writes:

' As the vowel E is used more than five times oftener than any other letter, this story was written, not through any attempt to attain literary merit, but due to a somewhat balky nature, caused by hearing it so constantly claimed that “it can’t be done; for you cannot say anything at all without using E, and make smooth continuity, with perfectly grammatical construction—” so ‘twas said.'

The first chapter of the book and indeed the whole book is here.

See if you can find an 'e' anywhere in there.