Skip to Search Skip to Navigation Skip to Content Skip to Footer
An outline of the Washington University in St. Louis shield.
Back to All News

William H. Gass Remembered Around the Web

By William Youngblood
Man stands by a wall of paper recycling.
William Gass as photographed by Pamala Blackwell. Photographic commission by the Getty Research Institute’s Scholar Program, environmental portraits of visiting scholars 1992 at a Paper Recycling Plant.

Over the weekend the world of literature absorbed and responded to the death of writer William H. Gass, and the remembrances started rolling in. We at the Modern Literature Collection are touched by the warm tributes to Gass’s life and work.  Here are a few selections from around the web:

The obituaries from The New York Times and The Guardian provide overviews of his life and work, as well as links to their own reviews of Gass’s work from over the years. (One correction from the NY Times obit: they credit him with winning two National Book Critics Circle Awards for Criticism–he won three.)

In The New Yorker, Benjamin Hedin focuses on Gass’s work as a literary critic and essayist, with particular attention to his writings on literary form and the importance of music of language in fiction.

Over at Lithub, Nick Ripatrazone writes on Gass’s influence, and Emily Temple collates Gass’s advice to writers, culled from over 40 years of interviews.

The website of Kenyon College, where Gass received his undergraduate degree in philosophy, has a fine and thorough remembrance.

On the blog bibliokept, Edwin Turner writes, in fine, looping, Gassian style of Gass’s influence on him as both a writer and a reader.

In the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, former student Paul Pennick writes a brief remembrance of Gass’s philosophy class and his strengths as an inspiring lecturer.

Gass was also well-remembered around the world, particularly in Europe, where he was much respected as one of the finest thinkers and writers American literature produced in the 20th century, as attested in articles from Les Inrockuptibles, Le Monde, and Zeit.