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Gass was born in Fargo, North Dakota. Soon after his birth, his family moved to Warren, Ohio, 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.

He attended Wesleyan University, then served as an Ensign in the Navy during World War II, a period he describes as perhaps the worst of his life. He earned his A.B. in philosophy from Kenyon College in 1947, then his Ph.D. in philosophy from Cornell University in 1954, where he studied under Max Black. 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 experiments.

Gass taught at The College of Wooster, Purdue University, 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 have included the writers Stanley Elkin, Howard Nemerov (1988 Poet Laureate of the United States), and Mona Van Duyn (1992 Poet Laureate). Since 2000, Gass has been the David May Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in the Humanities.

Earning a living for himself and his family from university teaching, Gass began to publish stories that were selected for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of 1959, 1961, 1962, 1968 and 1980, as well as Two Hundred Years of Great American Short Stories. His first novel, Omensetter's Luck, about life in a small town in Ohio in the 1890s, was published in 1966. Critics praised his linguistic virtuosity, establishing him as an important writer of fiction. In 1968 he published In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, five stories dramatizing the theme of human isolation and the difficulty of love. Three years later Gass wrote Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, an experimental novella illustrated with photographs and typographical constructs intended to help readers free themselves from the linear conventions of narrative. He has also published several collections of essays, including On Being Blue (1976) and Finding a Form (1996). His latest work of fiction, Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas, was published in 1998. His work has also appeared in The Best American Essays collections of 1986, 1992, and 2000.
Gass has cited the anger he felt during his childhood as a major influence on his work, even stating that he writes "to get even." Despite his prolific output, he has said that writing is difficult for him. In fact, his epic novel The Tunnel, published in 1995, took Gass 26 years to compose. An unabridged audio version of The Tunnel was released in 2006, with Gass reading the novel himself.

When writing, Gass typically devotes enormous attention to the construction of sentences, arguing their importance as the basis of his work. His prose has been described as flashy, difficult, edgy, masterful, inventive, and musical. Steven Moore, writing in The Washington Post has called Gass "the finest prose stylist in America." Much of Gass' work is metafictional.

Gass has 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. 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. 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]]> male Fargo, North Dakota 1924/07/30 152653 0879233745 9780879233747 35 <![CDATA[In the Heart of the Heart of the Country & Other Stories (Nonpareil Books, #21)]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172245078m/152653.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172245078s/152653.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/152653.In_the_Heart_of_the_Heart_of_the_Country_Other_Stories 4.22 212 First published in 1968, this book begins with a beguiling thirty-three page essay and has five fictions: the celebrated novella "The Pedersen Kid," "Mrs. Mean," "Icicles," "Order of Insects," and the title story.

]]> 27855 4.00 1088 146 1968 156185 0879232374 9780879232375 24 <![CDATA[On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172261715m/156185.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172261715s/156185.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/156185.On_Being_Blue_A_Philosophical_Inquiry 4.22 161 27855 4.00 1088 146 1976 156188 0141180102 9780141180106 15 <![CDATA[Omensetter's Luck]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172261716m/156188.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172261716s/156188.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/156188.Omensetter_s_Luck 3.95 133 27855 4.00 1088 146 1966 156182 1564782131 9781564782137 24 <![CDATA[The Tunnel]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172261714m/156182.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172261714s/156182.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/156182.The_Tunnel 3.74 107 27855 4.00 1088 146 1995 49463 0465026222 9780465026227 9 <![CDATA[Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170359666m/49463.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170359666s/49463.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49463.Reading_Rilke_Reflections_on_the_Problems_of_Translation 3.95 80 27855 4.00 1088 146 1999 156187 0801484898 9780801484896 4 <![CDATA[Finding a Form: Essays]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172261715m/156187.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172261715s/156187.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/156187.Finding_a_Form_Essays 3.89 63 27855 4.00 1088 146 1996 300431 0879232544 9780879232542 5 <![CDATA[Fiction and the Figures of Life]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173530205m/300431.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173530205s/300431.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/300431.Fiction_and_the_Figures_of_Life 3.96 56 27855 4.00 1088 146 1970 156189 1564782123 9781564782120 8 <![CDATA[Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172261716m/156189.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172261716s/156189.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/156189.Willie_Masters_Lonesome_Wife 3.84 55 27855 4.00 1088 146 1968 156183 0465026206 9780465026203 2 <![CDATA[Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1223643468m/156183.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1223643468s/156183.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/156183.Cartesian_Sonata_And_Other_Novellas 3.80 49 Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas: here Gass introduces us to Ella Bend, a sensitive clairvoyant married to a rather burdensome husband. But no sooner does Gass get us started with a very conventional opening, ("This is the story of Ella Bend Hess, of how she became clairvoyant and what she was able to see") than he injects himself into it ("Her gift was the gift of the gods … inexplicable and merciless. Marvelous is what I mean. Miraculous. Mysterious? Surely not a word so weak. Yet it has to begin with an m"). It isn't long before Ella becomes a bit player in her own story, the starring role having been appropriated by artful digressions, dizzying streams of consciousness, and Gass's own formidable wordsmithing talents.

The other three novellas in this collection are equally high-concept: a traveling salesman falls in love with his hotel room and refuses to leave; an aging spinster literally loses herself in a line from an Elizabeth Bishop poem; a young boy inexplicably decides to live for revenge. The plots, such as they are, are offbeat enough to catch the interest--what holds it, however, is Gass at play in the fields of the word. Cartesian Sonata will not be to every reader's taste--those who are impatient with absurdity, non sequiturs, and pages and pages of verbal pyrotechnics may want to steer toward more conventional literature. Those who like their fiction liberally laced with equal measures of philosophy and anarchy, however, should give William H. Gass a try.

]]> 27855 4.00 1088 146 1998 156180 0307262863 9780307262868 4 <![CDATA[A Temple of Texts]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172261713m/156180.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1172261713s/156180.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/156180.A_Temple_of_Texts 3.95 37 Tests of Time, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

These twenty-five essays speak to the nature and value of writing and to the books that result from a deep commitment to the word. Here is Gass on Rilke and Gertrude Stein; on friends such as Stanley Elkin, Robert Coover, and William Gaddis; and on a company of “healthy dissidents,” among them Rabelais, Elias Canetti, John Hawkes, and Gabriel García Márquez.

In the title essay, Gass offers an annotated list of the fifty books that have most influenced his thinking and his work and writes about his first reaction to reading each. Among the books: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (“A lightning bolt,” Gass writes. “Philosophy was not dead after all. Philosophical ambitions were not extinguished. Philosophical beauty had not fled prose.”) . . . Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (“A man after my own heart. He is capable of the simplest lyrical stroke, as bold and direct as a line by Matisse, but he can be complex in a manner that could cast Nabokov in the shade . . . Shakespeare may have been smarter, but he did not know as much.”) . . . Gustave Flaubert’s letters (“Here I learned—and learned—and learned.”) And after reading Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, Gass writes “I began to eat books like an alien worm.”

In the concluding essay, “Evil,” Gass enlarges upon the themes of artistic quality and cultural values that are central to the books he has considered, many of which seek to reveal the worst in people while admiring what they do best.
As Gass writes, “The true alchemists do not change lead into gold, they change the world into words.”

A Temple of Texts is Gass at his most alchemical.]]> 27855 4.00 1088 146 2006