William H. Gass

William Howard Gass ( born July 30, 1924 in Fargo, North Dakota) is an American writer and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy.

Life

Born in North Dakota, Gass grew up in Warren ( Ohio). His childhood he described as unhappy, with an abusive, racist father and a passive, alcoholic mother.

He studied at Wesleyan University in Middletown. The subsequent service in the Navy during the Second World War he described as probably the worst time of his life. In 1947 he completed his studies at Kenyon College and received his doctorate in 1954 at Cornell University with the dissertation A Philosophical Investigation philosophy of language of metaphor.

Gass taught at several universities, most recently from 1969 to 1999 as a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.

The work of Gertrude Stein was one reason that he also turned to literary writing. In the late 1950s, he began with the release of Short Stories. Gass named the anger he felt during his childhood, as a major influence on his work, described his writing even as billing.

Works

Fiction

  • Omen Etter 's Luck (1966 )
  • In The Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968 )
  • Willie Masters ' Lonesome Wife ( 1968)
  • The Tunnel (1995), German translation by Nikolaus Stingl: The tunnel. Random House, Reinbek 2011, ISBN 978-3-498-02488-8.
  • Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas (1998)
  • Middle C ( in the making )

Non-Fiction

  • Fiction and the Figures of Life ( 1970)
  • On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (1976 )
  • The World Within the Word (1978 )
  • Habitations of the Word (1984 )
  • Finding a Form (1996 )
  • About Robert Walser. Residenz Verlag, Salzburg / Vienna 1997, ISBN 3-7017-1085-6.
  • Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation ( 1999)
  • Tests of Time (2002)
  • A Temple of Texts (2006)
  • Music of language, William Gass in conversation with Sieglinde Geisel, in: Lettre International, LI 99, Winter 2012
Middletown (Connecticut) Integrated Authority File
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