Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), one of the most popular and influential American authors of the twentieth century, sparked the imagination of generations of writers. His Foundation trilogy paved the way for science fiction that was more speculative and philosophical than had been previously seen in the genre, and his book I, Robot and his story -The Bicentennial Man- have been made into popular movies. First published as a teenager in John W. Campbell's groundbreaking science fiction magazine Astounding, Asimov published over two hundred books during his lifetime.

While...

There are few writers about whom it can be said that they write just like they speak, but Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) is clearly one of them. In 1958, Kerouac was a struggling writer trying to create a new literary aesthetic based on the rhythms of human speech, jazz-based improvisation, autobiography, and American slang. That year saw the publication of his second novel On the Road, which would instantly propel him to fame and ensconce him in the literary establishment. By 1969, he was dead of internal hemorrhaging brought on by excessive drinking. Though his literary reputation may...

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (b. 1927) is a sophisticated literary artist with broad popularity. His masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, has sold tens of millions of copies worldwide. In 1982, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Conversations with Gabriel Garcia Marquez starts with the years of his early phenomenal success and continues through his most recent, turn-of-the-century exchanges. He speaks of his impoverished childhood, his life as an indifferent student, his apprenticeship as a journalist, the inspiration that led to the writing of his most renowned...

Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) felt that part of his role as a poet and critic was to bear witness to bloodshed and terror as well as to beauty. He survived the Soviet invasion of his beloved Lithuania, escaped to Nazi-occupied Warsaw where he joined the Socialist resistance, then witnessed the Holocaust and the razing of the Warsaw Ghetto. After persecution and censorship triggered his defection in 1951, he found not relief but the anguish of solitude and obscurity.

In the years of loneliness and labor, Milosz continued writing poems and essays, learning to love his privacy and...

In little more than twenty years, playwright August Wilson (1945-2005) completed a ten-play cycle depicting African American life in the twentieth century, with each play taking place in a different decade. Two of the plays--Fences (1987) and The Piano Lesson (1990)--were awarded the Pulitzer Prize, and seven of them received the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best American play. Wilson was indisputably the most significant American playwright to emerge since Edward Albee.

Conversations with August Wilson collects a selection of the many interviews Wilson...

In 1968, Thomas McGuane (b. 1939) dazzled the literary world with his highly acclaimed debut novel, The Sporting Club. His second work, The Bushwacked Piano, a comic novel, won the Rosenthal Award of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1974, his third novel, Ninety-two in the Shade, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Critics marveled at McGuane's abilities and drew comparisons between him and America's greatest writers.

McGuane has been dubbed -a writer's writer.- He has been praised for his technical luminosity, his savagely comic...

In a fifteen-year period beginning in 1988, Mississippi native Larry Brown (1951-2004) published two collections of short stories, five novels, a memoir, and two collections of essays. Two of his novels, Joe and Father and Son, won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.

Brown wrote with compassion, humor, and unflinching honesty about the struggles of rural and small-town working-class southerners. Twenty-nine years old when his writing career began, Brown's plainspoken style, sharp eye for detail, and keen ear for dialogue quickly established him as one of the most...

Conversations with Sonia Sanchez is a diverse collection of engagements with poet, teacher, and activist Sonia Sanchez. While it is common to associate Sanchez with the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s, these interviews reveal that Sanchez is a poet whose craft and subjects have evolved over three decades. The interviews from 1979 to 2005 include a previously unpublished interview conducted by the editor specifically for this book. Taken together, the pieces illuminate Sanchez's conscious and consistent work at honing her craft, her skill at raising the highly political to the level...