Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on November 5, 1998.

William Gass is a novelist, essayist, philosopher, and teacher. Mr. Gass, whose books include Cartesian Sonata, The Tunnel, and Omensetter’s Luck, received the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997. William Gass states in his essay Culture, Self, and Society, “A culture morally and functionally fails which does not let its crazies, its artists and its saints, its scientists and politicians, claim, on occasion, a higher law than its own congresses can pass, traditions permit, or conscience conceive.”

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also listen to the audio recording of this event there.