William H. Gass Summary

William Howard Gass was born in Fargo, North Dakota, on 30 July 1924 but his family almost immediately moved to Warren, Ohio, where he grew up. As a child he found it difficult to deal with an alcohol... Read more

Critical Essay by Gore Vidal Gass's essays are often eerily good. At his best, he can inhabit a subject in a way that no other critic now writing can do (see, in particular, his commentaries on... Read more

Critical Essay by Paul West [Gass's] brow is high, his taste learned and eclectic; his responses to books and their authors are both delicate and earthy, and sometimes orchestrated in their own... Read more

Critical Essay by Ross Feld [Employing in The World Within the Word] a prose style equivalent to the Slinky toy, Gass lands always on this: that writers have only language, language has them—an... Read more

Critical Essay by Liam Hudson On Being Blue is quite extraordinary. Very short, it is an inquiry by a philosopher into the wonders that can be worked with words. But although its terms of reference ar... Read more

Critical Essay by Samuel Irving Bellman "'So I have sailed the seas and come …,'" wrote the footloose philosopher and polymath William H. Gass, by way of introducing... Read more

In the following review, Dirda offers positive assessment of The Tunnel. Long awaited. Eagerly anticipated. Thirty years in the making. Such siren calls have sounded before—most recently luring... Read more

In the following review, Leonard offers favorable evaluation of The Tunnel, concluding that is “a splendid, daunting, loathsome novel.” Your wife is fat. Your penis is tiny. Your childre... Read more

In the following review, Percesepe provides a summary of The Tunnel and comments on its critical controversy. Having completed his magnum opus, Guilt & Innocence in Hitler's Germany, Wil... Read more

In the following review, Lewis comments on Gass's literary aesthetic and offers positive evaluation of Finding a Form. I happened to be passing through St. Louis one summer weekend in 1989, and... Read more

In the following review, O'Brien offers praise for Finding a Form. Gass is a writer who has always believed in public discourse, that the act of the critic and scholar is to engage as wide an a... Read more

In the following essay, Caramello examines Gass's postmodern ambivalence toward authority, textuality, and the deconstruction of reality in Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife. If dreams are m... Read more

In the following review, Saltzman offers positive assessment of Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas. William Gass regularly demonstrates how the artist's devotion is best measured by his concer... Read more

In the following essay, Hadella examines Gass's theoretical perspective, literary allusion, and narrative authority in “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.” According to Had... Read more

In the following essay, Dyck examines underlying modernist aspects of Gass's postmodern literary and theoretical perspective, including comparative analysis of Gass's story “Icicl... Read more

In the following essay, Stevick examines the significance of Gass's comments on his own work in light of his problematic insistence on the nonreferentiality of his texts. Stevick draws attentio... Read more

In the following review, Rubin offers unfavorable assessment of The Tunnel. William H. Gass's first novel, Omensetter's Luck, was published in 1966. The Tunnel, his second full-length no... Read more