Bill Gruber is Professor of English and Adjunct Professor of Theater Studies. He was educated at Yale University, the University of Idaho, and Washington State University (PhD 1979). He worked as a journalist and served in the Marine Corps before becoming a college professor. He is the author of Comic Theaters: Studies in Performance and Audience Response (1986; Choice Outstanding Academic Book), Missing Persons: Character and Characterization in Modern Drama (1994), and On All Sides Nowhere: Building a Life in Rural Idaho (2002 Bakeless Prize for nonfiction). He teaches courses in drama and the history of drama, especially British and continental drama of the twentieth century and also in creative nonfiction. His most recent publications include scholarly articles on Samuel Beckett and the Austrian dramatist Thomas Bernhard as well as personal essays on subjects such as wheel bearings, the color indigo, and a fallen-down barn.