Bibliophilia and Influences
This section shows the centrality of books in general and of certain writers in particular to Gass's life and work.
Bibliophilia
Gass liked to say that he lived in a library, and with an estimated 22,000 books organized by genre on shelves in almost every room of his three-story home, who could argue? (To be clear, however, he lived in a non-lending library.) Being around books--as well as reading them, of course--had always been an intense inspiration for Gass, from his days shirking his officer duties in the Navy while he stowed himself away reading Hemingway or Faulkner, to hiding out for hours on end in the stacks of the Cornell University library, to his long-time practice of purchasing some 30 new books every month for his home collection.
Influences
You need only to leaf through the exhibit catalog, A Temple of Texts: Fifty Literary Pillars, or look at the titles of his many essays to discern whom some of Gass's deepest literary influences were: Rilke, Proust, James, Stein, Borges, Kafka, Walser, Joyce, O'Brien, Porter... But for someone so steeped for so long in the best literature of the world (not to mention the philosophy and other types of books at his disposal), that list is only the beginning. The influences of William H. Gass are topics for books and PhD dissertations to explore. And as Gass himself joins the luminaries of his library as an influence on the writers that are following him, his own literary pillar will surely be standing for as long as innovative prose is being written and studied.
