The Tunnel

Perhaps even more chillingly relevant today than it was thirty years ago, this gripping and deeply personal interrogation of fascism returns to print at last in a remarkable full-color anniversary edition.

The Tunnel, William H. Gass' colossal second novel, thundered onto the literary scene after three decades at the typewriter. Hailed by many as an indisputable masterpiece, reviled by others as a suffocating and overwhelming experiment, The Tunnel has been voraciously studied by readers ever since. The story of a middle-aged history professor who, upon nearing completion of his magnum opus, "Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany," finds himself implicated in his own research, and begins to write a parallel work of history: his own life's story. Fearing that someone might find these confessional pages, he begins to dig a tunnel out from beneath his home in an attempt to hide, or escape, from the past that he has so diligently cataloged.

The Tunnel is many things: an awe-inspiring and apocalyptic novel that reckons with the accumulating brutality of the twentieth century; a mirror, asking readers to confront their own potential for darkness; and the crowning achievement by one of America's great prose stylists.

William H. Gass (1924-2017) was an essayist, novelist, and literary critic. He graduated from Kenyon College and received his PhD at Cornell University. He taught philosophy at both Purdue University and at Washington University in St. Louis where he was the David May Distinguished Professor of Humanities. In 1990, Gass founded the International Writers Center (now known as the Center for the Humanities) and served as its director until his retirement in 2000.