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William H. Gass (Cyclopedia of World Authors)

William Howard Gass, whose sensuous, deeply textured prose made him one of the most celebrated American stylists, is at once a leading theorist and a practitioner of postrealist fiction. The tribulations of life in the Midwest during the Depression, which were intensified for Gass by his father’s crippling arthritis and his mother’s alcoholism, inform the blasted environments and “grayed in” attitudes that are so prevalent in his fiction. As a child, Gass escaped into books. At Kenyon College, which he entered in 1942, he majored in philosophy and took courses from John Crowe...

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