With roots in the American South, Beth Henley has for four decades been a working playwright and screenwriter. These interviews range from 1981, just before she won the Pulitzer Prize, to 2020 and cover nearly forty years of a creative life, which, as Henley remarks, is ""such a life worth living: to be in tune with the creative process.

With roots in the American South, Beth Henley (b. 1952) has for four decades been a working playwright and screenwriter. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 at the age of twenty-eight, Henley so far has written twenty-five produced plays that are always original, usually darkly comic, and often experimental. In these interviews, Henley speaks of the plays, from her early crowd-pleasers, Crimes of the Heart and The Miss Firecracker Contest, to her more experimental plays, including The Debutante Ball and Control Freaks, to her brilliant and time-bending play, The Jacksonian. Henley is a...

Jerry Ward Jr has published nonfiction, literary criticism, encyclopedias, anthologies, and poetry. He is also a respected scholar with a specialty in African American literature. This volume offers an account of Ward's responses to questions about literature, literary criticism, teaching, writing, civil rights, Black aesthetics, race and culture.

Jerry W. Ward Jr. (b. 1943) has published nonfiction, literary criticism, encyclopedias, anthologies, and poetry. Ward is also a highly respected scholar with a specialty in African American literature and has been recognized internationally as one of the leading experts on Richard Wright. Ward was Lawrence Durgin Professor of Literature at Tougaloo College, served as a member of both the Mississippi Humanities Council and the Mississippi Advisory Committee for the US Commission on Civil Rights, and cofounded the Richard Wright Circle and the Richard Wright Newsletter. He has won numerous...

Presents eleven interviews, drawn from Jimmy Carter's five decades as a public figure, that capture the complexities and contradictions that have defined him - and that have helped to both reflect and shape the highest aspirations of the American experiment.

When Jimmy Carter (b. 1924) lost the presidency in 1980, it would have been reasonable to think his public life was coming to an end. The moderate, evangelical, blue-jeans-wearing peanut farmer made an unlikely governor of Georgia, and an even less likely winner of the vicious 1976 Democratic presidential nomination. Coming into an era of American politics where evangelical and rural voters became increasingly identified with the Reagan revolution, and the Democratic Party’s identity became increasingly secular and urban by attrition, he did not fit neatly into the political categories of...

On the strength of a National Book Award for his novel Going After Cacciato and a widely acclaimed short-story cycle, The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien (b. 1946) cemented his reputation as one of the most compelling chroniclers of Vietnam—and, in the process, was cast as a "Vietnam writer." But to confine O’Brien to a single piece of ground or a particular style is to ignore the broad sweep of a career spanning nearly four decades. In addition to detailed discussions of all of O’Brien’s work—a memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone, and seven books of fiction—the sixteen...