A half century ago, William H. Gass completed his doctoral dissertation in philosophy. Its title, “A Philosophical Investigation of Metaphor,” seems prophetic, announcing the two constants that would fill the many books he’d eventually write: intellectual might, and a consuming relationship with language and imagery. The combination produced writing that could win readers over via its energy and sparkle, then move them via its substance. Rarely had prose that so shimmered and soared been, at heart, so heavy with ideas. (In a 1978 public debate about fiction, John Gardner said, of his writing versus Gass’s: “The difference is that my 707 will fly and his is too encrusted with gold to get off the ground.” Gass replied, “There is always that danger. But what I really want is to have it sit there solid as a rock and have everybody think it is flying.”)

Gass’s works of fiction include Omensetter’s Luck (1966), Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (1968), In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (1968), and the long and challenging novel The Tunnel (1995), on which he labored for nearly thirty years. Narrated by a despicable university historian named William Kohler, whose bitterness is often seductively lyrical, The Tunnel was met with both high praise and thorough disdain. Dalkey Archive Press, which has published the novel since the late 1990s, will soon release an unabridged audio reading by the author, recorded during the past year.

Gass is perhaps best known for his erudite and lively books of essays, which include On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (1976), Habitations of the Word (1985), Finding a Form (1996), and Tests of Time (2002), the last two of which earned him National Book Critics Circle Awards for Criticism. For his book Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation (1999), he was awarded the PEN/American Nabokov Award.

I met William H. Gass earlier this year at his St. Louis home, which he shares with his architect-wife and 19,000 books. Washington University, where he taught philosophy for thirty years and founded and directed the International Writers Center, is just down the block. At eighty years of age, Gass is still very much a working writer. His next book of essays, A Temple of Texts, is forthcoming from Knopf, and he is, he thinks, halfway through another novel. At the time of our talk, the author was preparing to leave town for a mentoring conference on a very Gassian theme: “The Architecture of the Sentence.”

—Stephen Schenkenberg

I. ON KNITTING

THE BELIEVER: When your first book, Omensetter’s Luck,...