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 First Person Singular: Writers On Their Craft
Compiled by Joyce Carol Oates
Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review Press, 1983
280 pages
Dust Jacket Blurb
Here is a remarkable gathering: twenty-nine outstanding North American writers speak frankly of the secrets of their craft in highly original and provocative pieces, many of them never published before in book form. Saul Bellow discusses the role of the writer in a Philistine culture; Adrienne Rich tells of a new "psychic geography" to be explored, especially by women writers; John Updike confesses that "success breeds disillusion as surely as failure" and asserts that the writer in mid-career must be born again; Cynthia Ozick tells of her long and painful apprenticeship to Henry James; E.L. Doctorow discusses the moral obligation of the writer in "post-humanist" America; Francine du Plessix Gray speaks of writing out of "a desire for revenge against reality."
A rich and varied collection of essays and conversations, First Person Singular also includes Margaret Atwood, Hortense Calisher, Gail Godwin, Mary Gordon, John Hawkes, John Hollander, Maxine Kumin, Howard Nemerov, Joyce Carol Oates, Reynolds Price, Ned Rorem, Dave Smith, William Stafford, Anne Tyler, Eudora Welty, and others.
Reviews
- Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 1983, p1126
- Publishers Weekly, November 4, 1983, p54
- New York Times, December 13, 1983, sec 3 p21
- Atlantic, January 1984, p96-98
- Library Journal, February 1, 1984, p181
- Chatelaine, April 1984, p4
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Contents
John Updike : Why Write?
Cynthia Ozick : The Lesson of the Master
Saul Bellow : Some Questions and Answers
Gail Godwin : A Diarist on Diarists
John Hollander : The Poetry of Everyday Life
A Conversation with Bernard Malamud
Eudora Welty : Words into Fiction
William Heyen : A Memoir of John Berryman
Hortense Calisher : from Pushing Around the Pantheon
A Conversation with Margaret Atwood
Ned Rorem : Lies: Notes on Craft
Adrienne Rich : When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision
An Interview with Howard Nemerov
Mary Gordon : The Parable of the Cave or: In Praise of Watercolors
Reynolds Price : Love Across the Lines
"A Trap to Catch Little Birds With:" An Interview with John Hawkes
Anne Tyler : Still Just Writing
Dave Smith : Assays
Joyce Carol Oates : (Woman) Writer
An Interview with Theodore Weiss
Maxine Kumin : Recitations
William Stafford : The Tradition of Total Experience
Daniel Halpern : The Pursuit of Suffering
Politics and the Mode of Fiction: A Conversation with E. L. Doctorow
Francine Du Plessix Gray : I Write For Revenge Against Reality
Hayden Carruth : The Question of Poetic Form
A Conversation with Mark Strand
Alice Adams : Why I Write
Grace Schulman : "And a Great Amount of Joy in the Thing"
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Page address:
http://jco.usfca.edu/works/anthologies/first.html
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