William Gass Biography Quotes 2 Report mistakes

Early Life
William Howard Gass was born on July 30, 1924, in Fargo, North Dakota, and grew up largely in Ohio during the lean years of the Great Depression. He later recalled the atmosphere of Midwestern towns as formative, a source of both hardness and beauty that would feed his lifelong preoccupations with memory, malice, and the moral weather of ordinary lives. Books were early refuges, and language itself became his enduring subject; even in youth he was drawn to the feel of sentences, their rhythm and sound.

Education and Philosophy
After serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II, he completed his undergraduate studies at Kenyon College in 1947, in an environment animated by the Kenyon Review and a serious devotion to literature and ideas. He pursued graduate work in philosophy at Cornell University, earning a PhD in 1954. At Cornell he studied with figures such as Max Black and Norman Malcolm, whose analytic rigor and attention to the philosophy of language sharpened his sensibility. Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose work Malcolm helped to transmit, became a defining influence; Gass absorbed the later Wittgenstein's attention to ordinary language while insisting on the artistic autonomy of prose.

War and the Making of a Writer
Gass came out of the war with a sharpened sense of the fragility of institutions and the persistent presence of cruelty. He did not turn toward political manifestos so much as toward the alchemy of style, believing that the aesthetic integrity of a sentence was itself a moral act. That view, unusual in American letters of his era, would become his signature stance.

Academic Career
He taught philosophy at several institutions, most prominently Purdue University in the 1950s and 1960s. He often described writing fiction in difficult circumstances there, composing in a cinderblock office and carving out time amid teaching and service. In 1969 he joined Washington University in St. Louis, where he remained for decades, eventually becoming the David May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities. In St. Louis he worked alongside notable writers such as Stanley Elkin and the poet Howard Nemerov, forming a collegial circle that prized craft and ambition. In the early 1990s he founded the International Writers Center, a venue that brought writers and readers together and underscored his commitment to the public life of literature.

Fiction
Gass's first novel, Omensetter's Luck (1966), immediately marked him as a stylist of rare intensity, its portrait of an Ohio town suffused with linguistic energy and moral ambiguity. In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968), a collection that includes The Pedersen Kid, established him as a master of the short form, and Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife (1968) pushed typographic and narrative experiment. The Tunnel (1995), the work to which he devoted nearly three decades, is a vast excavation of bitterness, memory, and self-justification, its narrator's voice set against a dense architecture of motifs, lists, and aphorisms. Later volumes such as Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas (1998), Middle C (2013), and Eyes (2015) extended his exploration of voice and ethical self-scrutiny, often returning to Midwestern settings and the stubborn residues of history.

Essays and Criticism
Gass's essays, at once analytic and baroquely lyrical, run parallel to his fiction. Fiction and the Figures of Life (1970) and The World Within the Word (1978) articulate his belief that literature is a made thing, a temple built of sentences. On Being Blue (1976) is a bravura meditation on color, desire, diction, and the erotics of language. Habitations of the Word (1985), Finding a Form (1996), Tests of Time (2002), A Temple of Texts (2006), and Life Sentences (2012) continued his long argument for the primacy of form and figuration. Reading Rilke (1999), his translation-and-criticism hybrid, reveals his affinity for Rainer Maria Rilke and for the strenuous attention that true reading requires. He was a champion of Gertrude Stein and of innovators across languages, and he often worked with editors and publishers dedicated to experimental writing, including the circle around John O'Brien and Dalkey Archive Press.

Style, Influences, and Peers
Gass held that the sentence is the basic unit of literary art. His prose is sonically charged, thick with alliteration and internal rhyme, and unabashedly rhetorical. From Wittgenstein he took a skeptical ear for how words mean; from Rilke and Stein he gleaned permission to reinvent the music of thought. Among his American peers he is often placed alongside John Barth, William Gaddis, Robert Coover, and Stanley Elkin, writers who, in different ways, allied narrative invention with philosophical play. Yet Gass remained distinct in his insistence that ethics live in style itself: that to write well is to remake the world's moral possibilities.

Public Advocacy and the International Writers Center
At Washington University he founded and directed the International Writers Center, creating conferences and events that convened novelists, poets, essayists, and translators from many countries. The center emphasized the writer's responsibilities and freedoms, and Gass used his platform to argue for the protection of difficult art. He was an incisive lecturer and a generous interlocutor, often engaging visiting writers and students with the same intensity he brought to the page.

Recognition
Gass received numerous honors over the course of his career. His criticism earned National Book Critics Circle Awards, and The Tunnel received the American Book Award. In 2006 he was given the PEN/Nabokov Award for achievement in international literature. He was elected to learned societies and widely anthologized, not only as a creator of fiction but as a theorist of style whose essays became touchstones for later generations.

Later Years and Death
Gass continued to write into his nineties, publishing Middle C and Eyes while revisiting longstanding concerns: the grammar of self-deception, the sediment of history in ordinary speech, the old quarrel between moralizing and art. He died on December 6, 2017, in the St. Louis area, at the age of 93. Colleagues, students, and contemporaries remembered him as a consummate craftsman and a principled advocate for the rights of art. His body of work remains a monument to the powers of prose style and to the conviction that sentences, shaped with care, can make a life's meaning.

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