It is not a single cowardice that drives us into fiction's fantasies. We often fear that literature is a game we can't afford to play — the product of idleness and immoral ease. In the grip of that feeling it isn't life we pursue, but the point and purpose of life — its facility, its use.

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.