Professor WILLIAM H. GASS was appointed as a regular member of the department in 1969. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1954 with a dissertation titled A Philosophical Investigation of Metaphor, directed by Max Black. In 1979, he succeeded Professor Levi as David May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities. He has received honorary degrees from Kenyon College, George Washington University, and Purdue University. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1982, and to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983. In 1992, he was placed on the Agregation in France. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1943 to 1946. Professor Gass has been the recipient of many awards, including an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction in 1975 and Medal of Merit for Fiction in 1979. His work was included in The Best American Essays for 1986 and for 1992, in Best American Short Stories for 1959, 1961, 1962, 1968, and 1980, and in Two Hundred Years of Great American Short Stories. He won Pushcart Prize awards in 1976, 1983, 1987, and 1992, and in 1994 he received the Mark Twain Award for Distiguished Contribution to the Literature of the Midwest. Among other national commissions and committees, he has served on the Jury for the National Book Awards in Fiction for 1972, 1975, and 1989. He was Chair of the Fiction Panel for the National Endowment for the Arts from 1983 through 1985. He is on the editorial boards of American Book Review, Kenyon Review, and Conjunctions. In 1990, he became founding Director of the International Writers Center at Washington University. He received two awards for excellence in teaching at Purdue University, one at Washington University, and in 1968 the Chicago Tribune Award as One of the Ten Best Teachers in the Big Ten. He has received grants from Purdue University, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and was a Getty Foundation Fellow in 1991-1992. Professor Gass is author of Omensetter's Luck a novel, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country short stories, Willie Master's Lonesome Wife a novel, The Tunnel a novel, Fiction and the Figures of Life, On Being Blue, The World Within the Word, Habitations of the Word (which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism in 1985), and Finding a Form. He is co-editor (with Lorin Cuoco) of The Writer in Politics. His books, essays, and short stories have been reprinted many times and his works have been translated into Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish. Professor Gass has also made numerous presentations of his photography.