Gass, William Howard definition of Gass, William Howard in the Free Online Encyclopedia.

Gass, William Howard, 1924–, American author, b. Fargo, N.Dak., grad. Kenyon College, 1947; Ph.D. Cornell, 1954. In 1969 he became a professor of philosophy at Washington Univ., St. Louis. Rejecting traditional realism and interested in experimenting with the novel's form, he has been compared to Sherwood Anderson Anderson, Sherwood, 1876–1941, American novelist and short-story writer, b. Camden, Ohio. After serving briefly in the Spanish-American War, he became a successful advertising man and later a manager of a paint factory in Elyria, Ohio.
..... Click the link for more information. in his treatment of "grotesque" characters and to James Joyce Joyce, James, 1882–1941, Irish novelist. Perhaps the most influential and significant novelist of the 20th cent., Joyce was a master of the English language, exploiting all of its resources.
..... Click the link for more information. in his wordplay and linguistic complexity. His works include the novels Omensetter's Luck (1966) and The Tunnel (1995), the "novella-essay" Willie Master's Lonesome Wife (1968), Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas (1998), and works of literary criticism, including Fiction and Figures of Life (1970), Habitations of the Word (1985), Finding a Form (1996), Reading Rilke (2000), and Tests of Time (2002).