William H. Gass - Awards and Honors

Awards and Honors

Gass has received many awards and honors, including grants from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1965, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1970. He won the Pushcart Prize awards in 1976, 1983, 1987, and 1992, and in 1994 he received the Mark Twain Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Literature of the Midwest. In 1959 he was awarded the Longview Foundation Prize for Fiction for his story "The Triumph of Israbestis Tott" (a story later included as the first third of his novel Omensetter's Luck). Chicago Tribune Writers' and Critics' Poll named him one of the ten best American writers and one of the ten best Midwest writers in 1973. 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 1975 he received the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction. He was a Getty Foundation Fellow in 1991–1992. He received the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997; and the American Book Award for The Tunnel in 1997. In 2000 he was honored with the PEN/Nabokov award and the PEN/Nabokov Lifetime Achievement award which he has called his "most prized prize." Gass has received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism three times, for Habitations of the Word (1985), Finding a Form (1997) and Tests of Time (2003). Gass also received the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay in 2003.

Professor Gass founded the International Writers Center at Washington University in 1990, whose purpose was to "build on the strengths of its resident and visiting faculty writers; to serve as a focal point for writing excellence in all disciplines and in all cultures; to be a directory for writers and writing programs at Washington University, in St. Louis, in the United States, and around the world; and to present the writer to the reader." Although he retired from teaching full-time in 1999, Gass remains professor emeritus at Washington University. He has made numerous presentations of his photography, and he has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame. He also serves on the contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions. In 2000, Gass received the PEN/Nabokov Award. In 2003, he won the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay for Test of Time. In 2006, William H. Gass was a featured speaker at Lake Forest College for the 2006 &NOW Festival and the Lake Forest Literary Festival.

More recently, Gass has won the 2007 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin. The winner of this award is chosen by a panel of six authors, and s/he also receives a cash prize of $30,000. The panel awarded Gass for his 2006 collection of essays, A Temple of Texts.