William H. Gass

William H. Gass (born July 30, 1924, Fargo, North Dakota, U.S.—died December 6, 2017, St. Louis, Missouri) was an American writer noted for his experimentation with stylistic devices.

Gass called his fiction works “experimental constructions,” and each of his books contains stylistic innovations. His first novel, Omensetter’s Luck (1966), is about a man whose purity and good fortune are tainted when he is maliciously and falsely connected to a mysterious death. By piecing together various viewpoints, Gass creates levels of insight into character and setting; he does this, however, without the use of quotation marks to distinguish speakers. His novella Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (1968)—a woman’s reflections on her life and on language—makes use of typographical and other visual devices. Gass’s lush, acrobatic style has been criticized by some as being achieved at the expense of characterization, plot, and such conventions as punctuation.

Gass worked for 30 years to complete his second novel, The Tunnel (1995), a nearly plot-free exploration of the meanings of history, evil, and narrative. His critical writings Habitations of the Word (1985), Finding a Form (1996), and Tests of Time (2002) each won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Gass’s other works include In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968), short stories; Fiction and the Figures of Life (1970), collected critical essays; On Being Blue (1976), imaginative interpretations of the colour blue; The World Within the Word (1978), another collection of critical essays; Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation (1999), a critical analysis of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke; A Temple of Texts (2006), a series of meditations on books and reading; and Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (2012), a collection of essays on writing and literature. The novel Middle C (2013) charts the mendacities and misrepresentations of a music professor, beginning with his childhood escape from Nazi-occupied Austria under an assumed identity.

Gass taught philosophy at the College of Wooster (Wooster, Ohio), Purdue University (West Lafayette, Indiana), and Washington University (St. Louis, Missouri).