William Wharton was an American Expressionist painter who, perhaps out of frustration or possibly upon discovering his true gift, became an accomplished novelist.

Birdy, his first attempt at fiction, published in 1978 when Wharton was 53, was universally acclaimed, owing much, one suspects, to his training in both psychology and the Expressionist art characteristic of his time. It was an audacious debut, featuring the almost psychotic wish of a young man to live as a bird. It showcased the author’s staccato, first-person style, narrated in a continuous present that at its best has a startling immediacy but can also appear mannered and, ironically, dated.

Wharton’s life was packed with incident and touched by tragedy and loss. Drafted into the US infantry in 1943, he survived D-Day and the long campaign across France and the Low Countries, only to be seriously wounded and almost killed in the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes. His long recovery from his injuries gave him the time he needed to reflect on his experience — a process that continued intermittently throughout the remainder of his life.

In the 1950s, having taken advantage of the GI Bill to acquire a degree in fine art then a doctorate in psychology, he returned to France where, under his real name, Albert du Aime, he lived the life of an itinerant artist, bringing up his family on a houseboat and scratching a living from sales of his paintings.

In 1988 his daughter Kate, her husband and two young children were killed in a car accident in Oregon occasioned by smoke blowing across the road from a blazing cornfield. Three days later, Wharton claimed, his dead family members visited him in a dream — a phenomenon that would form the centrepiece of his memoir, Ever After, and lead him to take on the US justice system in a forlorn bid to have the deaths declared unlawful.

Albert William du Aime was born in Philadelphia on November 7, 1925. Little is known about his early life save that his father was a carpenter and that he annoyed his mother by keeping large numbers of canaries. He attended Upper Darby High School, a vast, multicultural institution, where his fellow students included Dick Richards, later drummer with Bill Haley and the Comets, and Alvin Sargent, a two-time Oscar-winning screenwriter.

Graduating in 1943, Wharton was immediately drafted into the US Army. It was intended that he should become an engineering specialist. Instead, having gone ashore at Normandy, he found himself slogging across Europe as an footsoldier in the 87th Infantry Division. The memory of his experience of comradeship, acute danger and chronic discomfort never left him. He was not discharged from the army until 1947, at which point he enrolled as an art student at the University of California, in Los Angeles, and going on to secure his PhD. Teaching was the obvious next step, but, aware perhaps of his French antecedents, he did not remain for long in the sprawling Los Angeles school system, electing instead to go to Paris and make his career as a painter.

In the decades that followed, this American, known to all as Du Aime, became almost a parody of the struggling artist. He had talent but not genius. To make ends meet, he renovated tiny apartments and sold them on, eventually retreating to the houseboat in which he and his wife Rosemary, née Henry, raised their children.

Home life chez Du Aime was chaotic and not always convivial. From time to time, money would run out and the family would retreat to California. It was sometime after 1975 that he began to write Birdy, a Kafkaesque tale in which a young man convinces himself he has become a bird. The novel was rejected by several publishers before it was picked up by Knopf and became an international bestseller.

Other books soon followed, including Dad, a road novel as well as a father-son-father psychodrama, and A Midnight Clear, harking back to his experience in the Ardennes. Wharton (his nom de plume) always argued that he was foremost a painter. “Not thinking of myself as a writer gives me the freedom to be one,” he told The Times in 1986.

The acclaim he enjoyed gradually faded, but not before he had made a lasting mark, most obviously in Poland, which continues to regard him as one of the great US masters.

“Fantasy and intimacy are two main thrusts of my work,” he once said. “I usually write in the first-person, continuous present to eliminate the artificial barrier of time and teller. One too often finds fiction told in the third person, past. It is a remnant from the ‘presidium’ of the theatre, separating players — participants — from audience. I want to, as much as possible, dissolve that barrier from my work.”

Wharton is survived by his wife, Rosemary, and their daughter and two sons.

William Wharton (né Albert William du Aime), artist and writer, was born on November 7, 1925. He died on October 29, 2008, aged 82