This collection, selected from more than 140 interviews Gardner granted,
presents a wealth of information on the life and art of one of America's
foremost novelists.
These interviews show him as a novelist, a charismatic teacher of
creative writing, and a widely published scholar who has vast knowledge
and who generated much literary information in his lectures and
interviews.
After the publication of such popular and critical successes as
Grendel (1971) and The Sunlight Dialogues (1972), this philosophical
writer with an enviable talent for storytelling was regarded as "a major
contemporary writer." After Gardner had demonstrated that he was one of
America's most prolific, versatile, and imaginative authors, he became
one of its most controversial when he attacked the literary
establishment in his book On Moral Fiction and in his interviews.
These candid conversations reveal a man of contrasts and contradictions,
a writer who, as one of his interviewers rema