Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Fifth Series

wi 3 5024 02 Nh | MERCER UNIVERO!! 1 >PARIS REVIEW Interviews replenaeri CHEEVER _ JAMESDICKEY = JOAN DIDION WILLIAM GASS= HENRY GREEN i.rosTtEeeeee -ocr rtty reteu ced 0) -- JOYCECAROLOATES is oreBASHEVIS SINGER = IRWIN SHAW — coolMoV noela PENGUIN BOOKS WRITERS AT WORK FIFTH SERIES The Paris Review, founded in 1953 by a group of young Americansincluding Peter Matthiessen, Harold L. Humes, George Plimpton, Thomas Guinzburg, and Donald Hall, has survived for twenty-seven years—ararity in the literarymagazine field, where publicationstraditionally last for a few issues and then cease. While the emphasis of The Paris Review's editors was on publishing creative work rather than nonfiction (among writers who published their first short stories there were Philip Roth, Terry Southern, Evan S. Connell, Samuel Beckett), part of the magazine’s success can be attributed to the public interest in its continuing series of interviews on the craft of writing. Reasoning that it would be preferable to replace the traditional scholarly essay on a given author’s work with an interview conducted with the author himself, the editors found a form which attracted considerable comment—from theveryfirst interview, with E.. M. Forster, which appearedin theinitial issue, in which the distinguished author, then considered the greatest novelist in the English language, divulged why he had not been able to complete a novel since 1926. Since that early interview the magazine has continued to complement its fiction and poetry selection with interviews from a wide range of literary personages, which in sum constitute an authentic and invaluable contribution tothe literary history of the past few decades. Previously Published WRITERS AT WORK The Paris Review Interviews FIRST SERIES Edited, and with an Introduction, by MALCOLM COWLEY Frank O’Connor Francois Mauriac Robert Penn Warren Joyce Cary Alberto Moravia Dorothy Parker Nelson Algren James Thurber Angus Wilson Thornton Wilder William Styron William Faulkner Truman Capote E. M. Forster Georges Simenon Francoise Sagan SECOND SERIES Edited by GEORGE PLIMPTON and introduced by vAN WYCK BROOKS Robert Frost Ezra Pound Marianne Moore T. S. Eliot Boris Pasternak Katherine Anne Porter Henry Miller Aldous Huxley Ernest Hemingway S. J. Perelman Lawrence Durrell Mary McCarthy Ralph Ellison Robert Lowell THIRD SERIES Edited by GEORGE PLIMPTON andintroduced by ALFRED KAZIN William Carlos Williams Blaise Cendrars Jean Cocteau Louis-Ferdinand Céline Saul Bellow Arthur Miller James Jones Norman Mailer Evelyn Waugh Lillian Hellman William Burroughs Allen Ginsberg Edward Albee Harold Pinter FOURTH SERIES Edited by GEORGE PLIMPTON and introduced by WILFRID SHEED Isak Dinesen Conrad Aiken Robert Graves George Seferis John Steinbeck Christopher Isherwood W. H. Auden Eudora Welty John Dos Passos Vladimir Nabokov Jorge Luis Borges John Berryman Anthony Burgess Jack Kerouac Anne Sexton John Updike Writers at Work The Paris Review Interviews FIFTH SERIES Edited by George Plimpton Introduction by Francine du Plessix Gray PENGUIN BOOKS Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England Penguin Books, 625 Madison Avenue, NewYork, New York 10022, U.S.A. Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia Penguin Books Canada Limited, 2801 John Street, Markham, Ontario, Canada L3R 1B4 Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand First published in the United States of America in simultaneous hardcover and paperback editions by The Viking Press and Penguin Books 1981 Copyright © The Paris Review, Inc.,