Check out “Let Me Make a Snowman: John Gardner, William Gass, and “The Pedersen Kid,'” an essay by Nick Ripatrazone that gives Gass’s famed novella a highly-scrutinized treatment and incorporates Gass and Gardner’s differing approaches to the understanding and writing of fiction. An excerpt:
“The Pedersen Kid” is the genesis of William H. Gass’s canon. Composed in 1951, the novella was not published until 1961, and then only “generously” by John Gardner “in his magazine, MSS.” In the interim, Gass was first published in Accent in 1958, and crafted several other stories that would comprise his seminal collection, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country. “The Pedersen Kid” predates his doctoral thesis, his multiple novels, his myriad philosophical and critical writings. It also condenses—and reflects—his nearly thirty-year critical and creative dialogue with Gardner, a literary discourse central to the friction between meta- and traditional fictions within the second half of the twentieth century. The novella is a microcosm of Gass’s aesthetic: his fiction is recursive and wound, taut along lines both linear and achronological, and any examination of his contribution to American letters must consider seeds sown in this odd tale about Swedish-Americans, death, and, most importantly, snow.