William Wharton: Artist and writer who found fame with the novel 'Birdy'

William Wharton – to give him the name by which the world knew him – liked to call himself "a crazy painter who lived on a boat." The description was true, as far as it went. He was a notable artist in the expressionist style; and for the last 40 years of an idiosyncratic life he spent much time first rebuilding, and then living on, a houseboat at Port Marly on the Seine, a few miles west of Paris.

But his truly great achievement was Birdy, the first of several books he produced in a second career as a writer that began at the age of 53. The novel, published by Knopf in 1979 and winner of the American Book Award, is the story of a couple of soldiers, set in a military hospital. One is Birdy, so physically and psychologically shattered by war that he retreats into a fantasy world in which he believes he is a canary; the other is his buddy Al, who tries to talk Birdy back to sanity. As Newsweek magazine wrote, "only the most rigorous imagination can make a story of this sort work for a reader who is generally indifferent to birds." But work it did – and not just for Newsweek's reviewer, Peter Prescott.

Birdy was a sensation, and the paperback rights were sold for $525,000, a vast sum even now for a first novel, not to mention 30 years ago. In 1984 the novel was turned into a movie starring Nicholas Cage and Matthew Modine, earning acclaim from critics and a near-cult following from its fans. Two later books also became films: Dad (1989), which was about a painter who lives on a boat, and A Midnight Clear (1992), a haunting tale of ordinary American and German soldiers who tried to make a Christmas peace in the closing stages of the Second World War.

Wharton was born Albert du Aime, into what he later called a "a very poor, hard-working, uneducated Catholic family" in Philadelphia. As a child, he was passionately interested in birds and kept 250 canaries at home. At 17, however, he volunteered for the Army and fought in France and Germany. After returning to the US he took a degree in art at the University of California in Los Angeles, and spent 11 years teaching art at local schools.

By 1960 however he had become increasingly averse to America's TV-fuelled and hyper-competitive consumerist society, and took his wife and young children off to live in Europe. They moved around Italy, Germany and Spain before settling in Parisin 1968. Though du Aime made hisliving as a painter, he had long been writing as a sideline. Only in 1977, however, did a friend look at his latest novel, Birdy, and persuade him to take it to a publisher.

Like most of Wharton's writing, the book draws heavily upon his own experiences – as a boy obsessed with birds and then as a young soldier exposed to the ghastliness of war. He saw people killed, and as an artillery observer was responsible for directing the shells that killed them, before being seriously wounded himself in the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944.

In combat Wharton discovered fear, and how "it can make you incapable of doing the right thing." War, he would explain, taught him that he was not a hero but a coward. "I defend cowards and I deplore heroes," he said in a 1996 interview. "Cowards keep the human race going."

Such modesty permeated his creative life as well. Money never much interested him, and when he received that colossal payment for Birdy, he invested it and virtually forgot about it. "My wife and I were content with what we had," he said. "There's not one thing we own now that we didn't own before we got all that money."

For all his success, moreover, he never really thought of himself as a writer. "I'm not a wordsmith," he once said, "I just basically look into my head and see the image and look for words."

He painted under his real name, but the last thing he wanted was literary celebrity. His books therefore appeared under a pseudonym, a combination of his own middle name William and his mother's maiden name, Wharton. That way, he believed, he could more honestly and completely put himself into them.

Like Birdy, most of them were semi-autobiographical. But none was as wrenchingly personal as Ever After – A Father's Tale (1995), about his daughter Kate, who was killed in 1988 along with her husband and two young children in a horrific multi-vehicle crash in Oregon, caused by smoke as a farmer burned off grass in a nearby field. Ever After recounts Kate's life and death, and Wharton's efforts to obtain redress in the courts, a battle that descended into deameaning haggling about the monetary value of human life. In all he produced a dozen books, some of them translated and aimed at the market in Poland, where for some reason he was hugely popular. At their best they have an astonishing immediacy.

"Fantasy and intimacy are the two main thrusts of my work," Wharton said. He always preferred to use the first person and the continuous present, in order "to eliminate the artificial barrier of time and teller." Most fiction, written in the past tense and using the third person, was, he argued, like traditional theatre in which the players were separated from the audience. "I want to dissolve that barrier as much as possible."

Rupert Cornwell

Albert William du Aime (William Wharton), painter and writer: born Philadelphia 7 November 1925; married 1955 Rosemary Henry (two sons, one daughter, and one daughter deceased); died Encinitas, Californ ia 29 October 2008.