Authors and Their Names

Authors and their names are confusing; no one would deny it. There's a Carver and a Coover, both of whose first names start with "R." There's a Joyce Kilmer, who wrote about trees, and a Joyce Cary, who wrote about the horse's mouth; and even though horses eat oats, neither of these individuals is Joyce Carol Oates. 

There's a Julian Barnes and a Nicholson Baker and a John Banville who will all be found rather close to one another on the shelf, at your local bookstore, and whose publication in later-20th century modern literary paperback format will fail to show much obvious visual grounds for differentiation. 

There's a Will Self, which sounds—and who sounds—like a Martin Amis character.

But perhaps no twinned-pair of similarly-named authors has been more frequently confounded with one another than William Gass and William Gaddis. And it's not just that they were contemporaries, both Americans, friends with one another, and have quite similar names. 

Add in the fact they both wrote long, involved, postmodern metafiction, and you have a recipe for conflation. 

I have been starting an attempt on both men's oeuvre over the past few months, and am thus far finding them less forbidding and unreadable than I had always feared (though, in fairness, I speak too soon—having not yet attempted either The Tunnel or The Recognitions). 

The point I am trying to establish here though has nothing to do with their merits as writers; it is more simply to note that they are two different people. 

One would be surprised by exactly how often this has been called into question. Reading the Wikipedia page on Carpenter's Gothic—the Gaddis novel I am tentatively planning to be my next foray into either man's work—one discovers that the New York Times itself, in its original print review of the novel, misattributed it to William H. Gass. 

But if there's one place on all the internet that really ought to be aware that Gass and Gaddis are two distinct people, it's the Amazon page selling The Tunnel—a novel that was in fact written not by both of them, but only by one of them. And yet, here is a current screenshot: