William H. Gass

William H. Gass (1924–2017) was the most purely language-drunk American writer of the second half of the twentieth century. While his contemporaries in the postmodern vanguard — Barth, Coover, Gaddis, Pynchon — were building elaborate architectures of plot and allusion, Gass was doing something more radical: treating the sentence itself as the fundamental unit of literary art, sculpting prose of such density and acoustic beauty that his fiction exists closer to music or poetry than to conventional narrative. He was also a professional philosopher, and his critical essays — on Gertrude Stein, Rilke, Ford Madox Ford, the nature of fiction — are among the most penetrating literary criticism ever written in English.

Life and Career

William Howard Gass was born in Fargo, North Dakota, and grew up in Warren, Ohio, in a household he described as toxic — an alcoholic, racist father and a disabled mother. These childhood miseries would fuel his fiction for decades, most directly in The Tunnel. He studied philosophy at Kenyon College (where he overlapped with the New Critics’ influence), then earned his PhD in philosophy at Cornell. He spent his academic career at Purdue and then at Washington University in St. Louis, where he founded the International Writers Center.

Omensetter’s Luck (1966, New American Library) was his first novel and remains, for many readers, his finest. Set in a nineteenth-century Ohio river town, it tells the story of Brackett Omensetter, a man who lives in a state of natural grace, and Jethro Furber, the minister consumed by envy of that grace. The novel’s language — baroque, incantatory, wildly inventive — announced a writer whose relationship to English was unlike anyone else’s. Stanley Elkin called it “the most important work of fiction by an American in this literary generation.”

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968) collected stories that demonstrated Gass’s range within his stylistic commitments — the title story, a meditation on small-town Indiana life structured as an index of topics, is one of the great American short stories. “The Pedersen Kid” is a compressed masterpiece of ambiguity.

The Tunnel and the Long Wait

Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (1968) was an experimental novella published as a special supplement to TriQuarterly, with typographic experiments, photographs, and multiple typefaces — a manifesto for fiction as a material art of language rather than a transparent window onto story.

Then came the long wait. Gass worked on The Tunnel for twenty-six years. Published in 1995 by Knopf, the novel is narrated by William Frederick Kohler, a historian of Nazi Germany who is writing an introduction to his academic opus but instead produces a confession of his own life’s failures, cruelties, and moral rot. The book is brilliant, exhausting, and deliberately repulsive — a 652-page performance of consciousness that many critics consider the most ambitious American novel of the 1990s, though others found it self-indulgent or morally claustrophobic.

Cartesian Sonata (1998) collected shorter fiction. Middle C (2013), published when Gass was eighty-eight, was a relatively accessible novel about a man who constructs a false identity as a music professor — a return to more traditional storytelling that won the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

The Essayist

Gass’s nonfiction may outlast his fiction. Fiction and the Figures of Life (1970), The World Within the Word (1978), Habitations of the Word (1985), Finding a Form (1996), and Tests of Time (2002) contain essays of extraordinary precision and style. His essay on Gertrude Stein (“Gertrude Stein and the Geography of the Sentence”) is the best thing ever written about Stein. His essays on Rilke, Proust, and Emerson are equally authoritative. He wrote about language the way a musician writes about sound — from the inside, with the authority of a practitioner.

Key Works

• Omensetter’s Luck (1966)
• In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968)
• The Tunnel (1995)
• Middle C (2013)

Collecting Gass

Omensetter’s Luck first edition (New American Library, 1966) is the key collectible — fine copies in dust jacket bring $300–$800, signed $500–$1,500. The dust jacket, designed by Paul Bacon, is distinctive. In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (Harper & Row, 1968) first edition brings $100–$300. Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (TriQuarterly, 1968) in its original supplement format is scarce and collectible. The Tunnel (Knopf, 1995) first edition is common but signed copies bring $100–$300. Gass signed willingly at events. His essay collections are underpriced ($20–$75 for first editions) given their literary quality and represent strong collecting opportunities. Dalkey Archive Press reissues of early work are available but less collectible than originals.