William Howard Gass (born July 30, 1924) is an American novelist, short-story writer, essayist, critic, and former philosophy professor. He has written three 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. His 1995 novel "The Tunnel" received the American Book Award