William Howard Gass was born on July 30, 1924, in Fargo, North Dakota. Soon after his birth, his family moved to
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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 Distinguish… See more

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.
Gass later … See more

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 … See more

Though much of Gass's central aesthetic has remained constant, there have been gradual shifts in his views of metaphor and ontology of the text. His view of metaphor is far more expansive than that proposed in his disserta… See more

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 Rev… See more