William Howard Gass

William Howard Gass 1924-, American author, b. Fargo, N.Dak., grad. Kenyon College, 1947; Ph.D. Cornell, 1954. In 1969 he became a professor of philosophy at Washington Univ., St. Louis. Rejecting traditional realism and interested in experimenting with the novel's form, he has been compared to Sherwood Anderson in his treatment of "grotesque" characters and to James Joyce in his wordplay and linguistic complexity. His works include the novels Omensetter's Luck (1966) and The Tunnel (1995), the "novella-essay" Willie Master's Lonesome Wife (1968), Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas (1998), and works of literary criticism, including Fiction and Figures of Life (1970), Habitations of the Word (1985), Finding a Form (1996), Reading Rilke (2000), and Tests of Time (2002).

Gass, William H[oward] (1924–), graduated from Kenyon College, received a Ph.D. from Cornell, became a professor of philosophy while carrying on a literary career, and was appointed to Washington University (St. Louis) in 1980. His fiction includes a novel, Omensetter's Luck (1966), about a symbolically significant man who comes to settle in an Ohio River town; In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968), stories and novellas, also evoking small‐town life in the Midwest; and Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife (1970), a lively novella about a stripteaser's recollections and activities, which is a commentary on art in general. In 1995 Gass published a monumental novel, The Tunnel, to critical acclaim. On Being Blue (1976) is a brief, fanciful meditation on the significance, sexual and other, of the color blue. Among his numerous volumes of literary essays, Habitations of the Word (1985) and Finding a Form (1996) each won National Book Critics' Circle Awards for criticism.