William Howard Gass (July 30, 1924 – December 6, 2017)[1] was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and philosophy professor.

[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.

From The Shadow to The History of the French Revolution, Gass read constantly, although there were no bookstores in the town of Warren[dubious – discuss].

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 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.

That same year Gass published 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.

"[10] Critical responses to The Tunnel upon its release included Robert Kelly's declaration that it was an "infuriating and offensive masterpiece,"[11] and Steven Moore's claim that it was ”a stupendous achievement and obviously one of the greatest novels of the century.”[12] Michael Silverblatt of the Los Angeles Times wrote in his review of the novel: "A bleak, black book, it engenders awe and despair.

As I read, I found myself devastated by the thoroughness of the book's annihilating sensibility and revived by the beauty of its language, the complexity of its design, the melancholy, horror and stoic sympathy in its rendering of what we used to call the human condition.

"[13] Gass, in reference to the harsh and disquieting nature of The Tunnel said "I don't think anything is sacred and therefore I am prepared to extol or make fun of anything.

Gass tells LeClair that "[m]etaphor has been thought to be a pet of language, a peculiar relation between subject and predicate ... [b]ut you can make metaphors by juxtaposing objects and in lots of other ways" (The Paris Review).

"[16] In this debut novel, William Gass details characters in a small town in rural Ohio during the 1890s and their reaction to the presence of a man named Brackett Omensetter whose confrontations with the crazed Reverend Jethro Furber galvanize the community.

Harper's described it as "A rich fever, a parade of secrets, delirious, tormented, terrifying, comic...one of the most exciting, energetic and beautiful novels we can ever hope to read.

"[17] The Tunnel is a novel about a man named William Frederick Kohler and his attempt to write an introduction to his historical magnum opus, "Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany."

But when Kohler tries to flesh out this minor introduction, mostly for the purposes of gloating over his colleagues, he instead finds himself writing a deeply personal book about the history of his own life.

In London during the war, the father disappeared, presumed to have escaped to Canada or the United States, and the rest of the family makes it to Ohio.

As an adult, Skizzen lives with his mother and has a rich fantasy life, centered on his Inhumanity Museum and Arnold Schoenberg.

[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.