Acclaimed novelist dies at 93

William H. Gass, whose ornate prose style, experimental novels and labyrinthine essays made him a master of difficult pleasures and one of the most influential writers of American literature’s postmodern movement, died Dec. 6 at his home in University City, Missouri, near St. Louis. He was 93.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said his wife, Mary Henderson Gass.

Gass wrote just three novels, none of them bestsellers, but he was often described as one of America’s finest literary stylists “a magician of the word, the writer of a prose so rich that it makes Vladimir Nabokov’s seem impoverished,” Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda wrote in 2013.

Among his most memorable works was a 90-page essay, “On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry” (1975), that plumbed the literal and metaphorical depths of the color blue, and in so doing seemed to mine the very essence of language itself.

“Blue pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings, the language of birds, bees and flowers as sung by longshoremen, that lead-like look the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fear; the rotten rum or gin they call blue ruin and the blue devils of its delirium,” Gass wrote in the book’s opening lines, kicking off a list that continued for a page and a half.

Literature was a singular obsession for Gass, who said that much of his work was fueled by anger, part of it worldly (”I write to indict mankind,” he once said) and part of it familial, traced back to a difficult childhood with an alcoholic mother and a father whom he described as a bigot.

Mixing the rigor of a philosopher with the passion of a novitiate, he was a three-time winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, for his essay collections “Habitations of the Word” (1984), “Finding a Form” (1996) and “Tests of Time” (2002).