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William H. Gass, Acclaimed Postmodern Author, Dies at 93

William H. Gass in 2013.Credit...Michael Lionstar

William H. Gass, a proudly postmodern author who valued form and language more than literary conventions like plot and character and who had a broad influence on other experimental writers of the 1960s, ’70s and beyond, died on Wednesday in St. Louis. He was 93.

The cause was congestive heart failure, his wife, Mary Henderson Gass, said. He lived in St. Louis, where he taught at Washington University for 30 years and was an emeritus professor at his death.

Mr. Gass was widely credited with coining the term “metafiction” to describe writing in which the author is part of the story. He himself was one of the form’s foremost practitioners.

His writing reflected his knowledge of philosophy and his academic background, but it also included irreverent and often bawdy limericks. He used ordinary words to great effect, as when he described a character as having “a dab of the dizzies,” but it was his metaphors (which he said came to him in “squadrons”), his rhythms and the effort he put into each sentence that made him the object of other writers’ admiration.

Sentences have souls, he explained in an essay, and if they were good enough “it would be a crime on the world’s part to let them die.” In an ideal sentence, he said, the words choose to be there. Sometimes more than 300 words chose to be in a Gass sentence, in which clauses, connected by semicolons, were strung out like railroad cars.

Plot, he argued, was of secondary importance, though it was not absent from his stories. His plots just didn’t come in standard linear form. Though he never wrote a chase scene or a courtroom scene, laws were broken in his stories, and there was plenty of terror and brutality.

Since his first novel, “Omensetter’s Luck,” was published in 1966, Mr. Gass was one of the most respected authors never to write a best seller. (He wrote only two other novels but many novellas, short stories and essays.)

He received a raft of awards, including two National Book Critics Circle Awards for collections of criticism and philosophy: “Habitations of the Word” in 1985 and “Finding a Form” in 1997. He won four Pushcart Prizes, the Pen-Faulkner Prize and a $100,000 lifetime achievement award from the Lannan Foundation in 1997.

The novelist John Barth, a fellow practitioner of metafiction, predicted that Mr. Gass would someday rank high in the history of American arts and letters. “If he doesn’t,” Mr. Barth said in 1999, “it will be history’s fault.”

Mr. Gass’s admirers loved the layers of poetry and philosophy that kept them digging like archaeologists through the strata of Western intellectual thought. But his complex fiction lost many readers and caused some critics to accuse him of sacrificing character for literary gimmicks.

“Oddly enough I think of myself as more of a realist than most of the realists,” he told The New York Times in 1999. “In my books there’s darkness. You don’t know everything. In the Victorian novel, everything is clear; in the real world, motives are mixed. People are unreliable. There are contradictions. People forget. There are omissions. You certainly don’t know everything. There aren’t good people and bad people. There are shades of this and that.”

His masterwork was “The Tunnel” (1995), a 652-page novel in which the main character, the lonely, miserable and unlikable William Frederick Kohler, a middle-aged history professor at a Midwestern university, retreats to his basement, where he begins, little by little, to tunnel his way out — metaphorically trying to escape from a loveless marriage and a painfully unhappy life.

All the while, Kohler reflects on that life in a series of digressions as he struggles to write the preface to his magnum opus, a study of Nazi Germany. Mr. Gass said of his character: “This guy is either lying or he is forgetting or he isn’t getting things right. That’s what life is like.”

“The Tunnel” took Mr. Gass almost 30 years to finish but did not find much of an audience. And while many critics praised it effusively, others, had trouble with it.

“It will be years before we know what to make of it,” the poet Robert Kelly wrote in The New York Times Book Review, calling the book an “infuriating and offensive masterpiece.”

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“The Tunnel” was once called an “infuriating and offensive masterpiece.”Credit...Knopf

William Howard Gass was born in Fargo, N.D., on July 30, 1924, the son of William Gass and the former Claire Sorenson. When he was six weeks old his father moved the family to Warren, Ohio. William grew up during the Depression, spending summers in North Dakota. “These were the dust bowl years, too; grasshoppers ate even the daylight,” he wrote.

His father, an architect and semiprofessional baseball player, taught drafting at Warren G. Harding Senior High School, from which young William graduated before attending Kenyon College. Mr. Gass later said a common theme of his work was the wasted opportunities he saw in his father’s bigotry, bitterness and crippling arthritis and his mother’s alcoholism.

In “The Tunnel,” he demonstrated the terrors and humiliations of everyday life in flashbacks to Kohler’s childhood.

In one scene, the young Kohler calls an ambulance for his ailing father. But the ambulance attendants begin carrying out his mother, an alcoholic who had passed out in the living room. “Not the one down here,” the boy says, pointing upstairs. “The one up there.”

Dead? an attendant asks.

No, the boy says, just practicing.

Mr. Gass’s education was interrupted by wartime service as an ensign in the Navy. After the war he received a doctorate in philosophy at Cornell and taught at Purdue. He came to Washington University in 1969.

He gained literary prominence in 1958 when Accent, the literary magazine of the University of Illinois, devoted an entire issue to his short stories. Eight years later “Omensetter’s Luck,” a historical novel about the conflict between a man of inexplicable good fortune and a fire-and-brimstone preacher, was published to great acclaim.

The theater and literary critic Richard Gilman called it “the most important work of fiction by an American in this literary generation” and praised its “replenishment of language.” In 1999, the novelist David Foster Wallace included it on a list of five “direly underappreciated” American novels written since 1960. It was translated into seven languages.

Mr. Gass’s other works of fiction were “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” a collection of two novellas and three stories (1968); “Willie Master’s Lonesome Wife” (1971), an “essay novella” that is essentially a woman’s interior monologue while she is engaged in sex; “Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas” (1998); and his third and last novel, “Middle C” (2013), the story of an Austrian immigrant who teaches music at a college in Ohio and whose life, like his father’s before him, is built on lies. (“His history was a forgery.”)

His many essay collections included “Fiction and the Figures of Life” (1970), “The World Within the Word” (1979) and “Reading Rilke” (2000).

His most recent book, “Eyes: Novellas & Stories,” came out in 2015. “The William Gass Reader” is to be published in June by Alfred A. Knopf, Mr. Gass’s longtime publisher.

Mr. Gass’s first marriage, in 1952, to Mary Pat O’Kelly, ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, he is survived by two sons, Richard and Robert, and a daughter, Susan Gass, all from his first marriage; two daughters from his second marriage, Catherine Gass and Elizabeth Gass-Boshoven; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

For decades, Mr. Gass led a spirited attack on the traditional American novel. “It is an ideological war that has been going on since the beginning of literature,” he said in 1999. “The whole problem of what the novel is supposed to be doing and what literature’s value is, whether it is truth or morality or what my friends accuse me of — aesthetic bliss — this will continue to go on.”

He said the Pulitzer Prize for fiction “takes dead aim at mediocrity and almost never misses.” He blamed university programs for creating writers whose stories treated ideas like “a cockroach in a picnic basket.” It wasn’t that these authors had been brainwashed by their teachers, he added; it was that they had “no brain to wash.”

At the height of the literary furor over postmodernism, Mr. Gass debated the novelist and critic John Gardner at the University of Cincinnati in 1978 about the role of the novel. Mr. Gardner argued that a novel had to be morally uplifting. Mr. Gass maintained that art and morality do not necessarily mix.

Mr. Gardner used aviation imagery to describe their different approaches: “What I think is beautiful, he would think is not yet sufficiently ornate. The difference is that my 707 will fly and his is too encrusted with gold to get off the ground.”

Mr. Gass replied, “What I really want is to have it sit there solid as a rock and have everybody think it is flying.”

Neil Genzlinger contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 26 of the New York edition with the headline: William H. Gass, Author Known for His Inventive Use of Words, Dies at 93. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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