Home / Profiles / William Gass

William Gass

William H. Gass is a novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and former professor of philosophy. His works of fiction include Omensetter’s Luck, Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, and The Tunnel, a project on which he spent thirty years.

Gass has also written numerous works of nonfiction, among them On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, Habitations of the Word, Finding a Form, and Tests of Time, the last two of which earned him National Book Critics Circle Awards for Criticism. Among his many honors, he has recieved an American Book Award, grants from both the Guggenheim and Rockfeller foundations, and, in 1999, the PEN/Nabokov Award for Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation.

Articles by William Gass

Organizational

Monday January 8

Toward Total Recall

Was it in the summer? It probably was . . . when you thought you had enough time on your hands to fill them with a book, when an unappointed space had appeared in your life . . . the summer when you decided to read Proust. Perhaps the impossible purpose appeared to you in late afternoon,

Organizational

Sunday December 11

Lifetimes Out of Moments

A small boat crowded to the gunnels with journalists met the docking of Gertrude Stein’s steamship in New York. Her name ran like an illuminated rabbit around Times Square. Her picture appeared above columns of copy which included both quotes and feeble but funny imitations of her style. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas had