William H. Gass
William Howard Gass (July 30, 1924 – December 6, 2017)[1] was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and philosophy professor. He wrote three novels, three collections of short stories, a collection of novellas, and seven volumes of essays, three of which won National Book Critics Circle Award prizes and one of which, A Temple of Texts (2006), won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. His 1995 novel The Tunnel received the American Book Award. His 2013 novel Middle C won the 2015 William Dean Howells Medal.
William H. Gass
William Howard Gass
July 30, 1924
Fargo, North Dakota, U.S.
December 6, 2017 (aged 93)
University City, Missouri, U.S.
- Short story writer
- novelist
- essayist
- critic
- philosophy professor
American
1959–2017
The Tunnel, A Temple of Texts, Middle C
Early life and education[edit]
William Howard Gass was born on July 30, 1924, in Fargo, North Dakota. Soon after his birth, his family moved to Warren, Ohio, a steel town, where he attended local schools.[2] He described his childhood as an unhappy one, with an abusive, racist father and a passive, alcoholic mother;[3] critics would later cite his characters as having these same qualities. His father had been trained as an architect but, while serving during the First World War, had sustained back injuries that forced him to take a job as a high school drafting and architectural drawing teacher. His mother was a housewife.
As a boy, Gass read anything he could get his hands on. From The Shadow to The History of the French Revolution, Gass read constantly, although there were no bookstores in the town of Warren. Later he would claim that the advent of "pocketbooks" saved his literary life. He'd save up all the money he earned or obtained and, every two weeks, head down and buy as many pocketbooks as he could afford. Even though Gass was always a reader, his father disapproved of his aspirations and often berated him for it.
He attended Ohio Wesleyan University after graduating from Warren G. Harding High School, where he did very well, except for some difficulties in mathematics, then served as an ensign in the Navy during World War II for three and a half years, a period he described as perhaps the worst of his life. He earned his A.B. magna cum laude in philosophy from Kenyon College (1947), where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. From there he entered Cornell University as a Susan Linn Fellow in Philosophy and, by 1954, had earned his PhD in that subject. While at Cornell, he studied under Max Black and, briefly, Ludwig Wittgenstein. His dissertation, "A Philosophical Investigation of Metaphor", was based on his training as a philosopher of language. In graduate school, Gass read the work of Gertrude Stein, who influenced his writing. He named the twelve most influential books of his life: Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, Virginia Woolf's Diaries, Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, James Joyce's Ulysses, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, Franz Kafka's A Country Doctor and Other Stories, Gustave Flaubert's Letters, Colette's Break of Day, W. B. Yeats's The Tower, William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Stein's Three Lives and William Gaddis's The Recognitions.[4]
Teaching[edit]
Gass taught at The College of Wooster for four years, Purdue University for sixteen years, and Washington University in St. Louis, where he was a professor of philosophy (1969–1978) and the David May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities (1979–1999). His colleagues there included the writers Stanley Elkin, Howard Nemerov (1988 Poet Laureate of the United States), and Mona Van Duyn (1992 Poet Laureate). After 2000, Gass was the David May Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in the Humanities.
Personal life[edit]
In 1952, before graduating from Cornell, he married Mary Pat O'Kelly. The marriage ended in divorce. He had two sons and a daughter with his first wife, Richard, Robert and Susan.[2]
Gass later married architect Mary Henderson Gass,[2] author of Parkview: A St. Louis Urban Oasis (2005).[5] They had twin daughters, Catherine and Elizabeth Gass-Boshoven.[2] Catherine is an artist teaching at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago[6] and is a photographer for the Newberry Library.[7][8]
Awards and honors[edit]
Gass received many awards and honors, including grants from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1965, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1970. He won the Pushcart Prize awards in 1976, 1983, 1987, and 1992, and in 1994 he received the Mark Twain Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Literature of the Midwest. In 1959 he was awarded the Longview Foundation Prize for Fiction for his story "The Triumph of Israbestis Tott" (a story later included as the first part of his novel Omensetter's Luck). Chicago Tribune Writers' and Critics' Poll named him one of the ten best American writers and one of the ten best Midwest writers in 1973. He has teaching awards from Purdue University and Washington University; in 1968 the Chicago Tribune Award as One of the Ten Best Teachers in the Big Ten. In 1975 he received the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction. He was a Getty Foundation Fellow in 1991–1992. He received the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997; and the American Book Award for The Tunnel in 1996. In 2000 he was honored with the PEN/Nabokov Award and the PEN/Nabokov Lifetime Achievement award which he has called his "most prized prize." Gass has received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism three times, for Habitations of the Word (1985), Finding a Form (1997) and Tests of Time (2003). Gass also received the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for Test of Time in 2003. In 2007 he was the recipient of the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates[19][20]
Gass founded the International Writers Center at Washington University in 1990, whose purpose was to "build on the strengths of its resident and visiting faculty writers; to serve as a focal point for writing excellence in all disciplines and in all cultures; to be a directory for writers and writing programs at Washington University, in St. Louis, in the United States, and around the world; and to present the writer to the reader." He made numerous presentations of his photography, and he has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.[21] He also served on the contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions. In 2006, William H. Gass was a featured speaker at Lake Forest College for the 2006 &NOW Festival and the Lake Forest Literary Festival.[22]
In Dan Simmons's science fiction novel Hyperion, Gass is referred to as "the twentieth century's most honoured writer" by the poet Martin Silenus.
More recently, Gass won the 2007 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin. The winner of this award is chosen by a panel of six authors, and s/he also receives a cash prize of $30,000. The panel awarded Gass for his 2006 collection of essays, A Temple of Texts.