Remembering the Great William Gass

"I began by telling a story to entertain a toothache.” Letters, sentences, paragraphs: for William Gass, they were all as tactile as mud. He loved words. He loved to turn them outside-in; he longed to cross our eyes before setting us straight. He was a cousin to Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, but was something else entirely. Don’t you dare call him a Midwestern writer: “I never had roots,” he said.

He was baptized by books. First the lofty lines of Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, how he hung on Guinevere’s words to Launcelot: “Go to thy realm, and there take thee a wife, and live with her with joy and bliss, and I pray thee heartily pray for me to our Lord, that I may amend my misliving.” He said that last “aching” phrase, amend my misliving, turned him loose—a boy born in North Dakota but raised in Ohio. ... [mehr] http://lithub.com/remembering-the-great-william-gass/