William Gass is one of the foremost theoreticians, champions, and practitioners of postmodern literature, and has also earned considerable eminence as an essayist and as a writer of fiction. Often grouped with such contemporary American authors as John...

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 alcoholic mother and a father crippled with arthritis. His...

"I began The Tunnel in 1966," William Gass said halfway through the highbrow magnum opus it took him 30 years to create. "And who knows, perhaps it will be such a good book no one will want to publish it. I live on that...

"My lips are highly rated, and my fingers celebrated, as for my tongue it's equally fun, however it's rotated ..." --Omensetter's Luck This limerick is uttered by Jethro Furber of Omensetter's Luck, one of William Gass's beleaguered but irrepressible and loquacious,...

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

In the following essay, Dettmar provides analysis of initiation themes, postmodern literary techniques, and psychoanalytic associations in Gass's story“The Pedersen Kid.” Dettmar concludes, “Jorge is not just another ‘little Oedipus’—rather he's a little Freud, both author and subject of his own case history.”

In the following essay, Klein examines Gass's postmodern conflation of personal and national history, morality, and guilt associated with the horrors of Nazi Germany as presented through the protagonist, Kohler, in The Tunnel. “Given the perspective to which we are invited,” Klein concludes, “Kohler's evil amounts to an irrelevant tawdriness.”