William H. Gass

William Howard Gass (July 30, 1924 – December 6, 2017) was an American novelist, short-story writer, essayist, critic, and philosophy professor. He penned three novels, three collections of short stories, a collection of novellas, and seven volumes of essays, three of which have 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. 2Life 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. He has described his childhood as an unhappy one, with an abusive, racist father and a passive, alcoholic mother; 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 o