The censor pretends he is protecting tender hearts, shielding children from sex and violence, keeping the righteous in the right path, guarding against temptation, preserving virtue. How? by burning books, tearing out tongues, stretching necks, stoning women; through torture and imprisonment; by threats of violence against the victim’s friends and family; by force-feeding his own people a philosophy not only false and wicked now but false and wicked the day it was first announced by some imaginary lord and used to purchase or preserve his privileges and hoodwink the world.

In 2003 he won the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for Test of Time. He has teaching awards from Purdue University and Washington University; in 1968 the Chicago Tribune Award as One of the Ten Best Teachers in the Big Ten. In an interview with Anglistik Gass commented on the subject of his genre and form defying works laughing off the title "Postmodern" and coining himself "Late" or "Decayed Modern"


Gass's Opinion of Metaphor
Gass' view on the topic of metaphor is complex and thoroughly encompassing.

His 1995 novel The Tunnel received the American Book Award. William Howard Gass (born July 30 1924) is an American novelist short story writer essayist critic and former philosophy professor. He has written two novels three collections of short stories a collection of novellas and seven volumes of essays three of which have won National Book Critics Circle Award prizes and one of which A Temple of Texts (2006) won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism.