A prolific playwright, Sam Shepard (1943-2017) wrote fifty-six produced plays, for which he won many awards, including a Pulitzer Prize. He was also a compelling, Oscar-nominated film actor, appearing in scores of films. Shepard also published eight books of prose and poetry and was a director (directing the premiere productions of ten of his plays as well as two films); a musician (a drummer in three rock bands); a horseman; and a plain-spoken intellectual. The famously private Shepard gave a significant number of interviews over the course of his public life, and the interviewers who respected his boundaries found him to be generous with his time and forthcoming on a wide range of topics. The selected interviews in Conversations with Sam Shepard begin in 1969 when Shepard, already a multiple Obie winner, was twenty-six and end in 2016, eighteen months before his death from complications of ALS at age seventy-three. In the interim, the voice, the writer, and the man evolved, but there are themes that echo throughout these conversations: the indelibility of family; his respect for stage acting versus what he saw as far easier film acting; and the importance of music to his work. He also speaks candidly of his youth in California, his early days as a playwright in New York City, his professionally formative time in London, his interests and influences, the mythology of the American Dream, his own plays, and more. In Conversations with Sam Shepard, the playwright reveals himself in his own words.

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 master at writing about the duality of human experience-the beautiful and the grotesque, the cruel and the loving. This duality provokes in Henley both amazement and compassion. She discusses here not only her admiration for Chekhov and other influences, but also her process of bringing a play from notebooks of images and bits of dialogues through rumination, writing, and rewriting to rehearsals and previews. The 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 in the most recent interview, is "such a life worth living: to be in tune with the creative process.

William Inge's popular plays of the 1950s received Tony nominations (Bus Stop, 1956, and Dark at the Top of the Stairs, 1958) and won a Pulitzer Prize (Picnic, 1953). As a screenwriter, he won an Academy Award (Splendor in the Grass, 1961). Yet Inge's career ended in perceived failure, depression and finally suicide. These previously unpublished essays take a fresh look at some of his most popular work, as well as his less well-known later plays. Inge's work was often ahead of its time, and foreshadowed the influence of popular media and advertising, the sexual revolution and the women's movement. The essays give context for Inge's work within 20th-century American drama, and attest to his exceptional talent. Included are reminiscences which reveal the playwright's charm and generosity, and shed light on how a brilliant, troubled man eventually took his own life.

Provides a representative selection of O'Neill's voluminous correspondence written over a fifty-year period to intimate friends and family and to literary and theatrical personalities.

"These bibliographical essays are geared for scholars and discuss 24 writers. . . . Excellent, readable, [and] useful." Choice

F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, has frequently been dismissed as an outlier and curiosity in his oeuvre, a transitional work from the coming-of-age plot of This Side of Paradise to the masterful critique of American aspiration in The Great Gatsby. The Beautiful and Damned belongs to a genre that is widely misunderstood, the "bright young things" novel in which spoiled and wealthy characters succumb to decay because of their privilege and lack of purpose. Set between 1913 and 1922, Fitzgerald's longest novel touches on many of the decisive issues that mark the passage from the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era into the Jazz Age: conspicuous consumption, income inequality, yellow journalism, the Great War, the rise of the movie industry, automobile travel, Wall Street stock scams, immigration and xenophobia, and the fixation with youth and aging. Published to coincide with the novel's centennial in 2022, this collection approaches The Beautiful and Damned for its insights more than its faults. Prominent Fitzgerald scholars analyze major themes and reveal unappreciated issues with attention to history, biography, literary influence, gender studies, and narratology. While acknowledging the novel's shortcomings, the essayists illustrate that The Beautiful and Damned has much more to say about its milieu than previously recognized. This collection provides a guide for understanding Fitzgerald's aims while demonstrating the richness of ideas that this novel explores, alongside the anxieties and ambitions that reverberate within it.

Neil Simon (1927-2018) began as a writer for some of the leading comedians of the day-including Jackie Gleason, Red Buttons, Phil Silvers, and Jerry Lewis-and he wrote for fabled television programs alongside a group of writers that included Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart, Michael Stewart, and Sid Caesar. After television, Simon embarked on a playwriting career. In the next four decades he saw twenty-eight of his plays and five musicals produced on Broadway. Thirteen of those plays and three of the musicals ran for more than five hundred performances. He was even more widely known for his screenplays-some twenty-five in all. Yet, despite this success, it was not until his BB Trilogy-Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues, and Broadway Bound-that critics and scholars began to take Simon seriously as a literary figure. This change in perspective culminated in 1991 when his play Lost in Yonkers won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In the twenty-two interviews included in Conversations with Neil Simon, Simon talks candidly about what it was like to write commercially successful plays that were dismissed by critics and scholars. He also speaks at length about the differences between writing for television, for the stage, and for film. He speaks openly and often revealingly about his relationships with, among many others, Mike Nichols, Walter Matthau, Sid Caesar, and Jack Lemmon. Above all, these interviews reveal Neil Simon as a writer who thought long and intelligently about creating for stage, film, and television, and about dealing with serious Subjects in a comic mode. In so doing, Conversations with Neil Simon compels us to recognize Neil Simon's genius.

This evocative collection of love letters chronicles one of the most legendary romances of all time. Much has been written about the fascinating marriage between Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Through his alcoholism and her mental illness, his career highs (and lows) and her institutional confinement, their devotion to each other lasted for more than twenty-two years. Their myth conjures up images of gleaming hotel lobbies, white suits, flappers, lavish parties and smoky speakeasies — a whole world of nostalgia for the Jazz age and the expatriate life in Europe.

The Fitzgeralds’ courtship and marriage was so tightly linked to their books that it has often been hard to distinguish between life and literature. Now, as a result of the meticulous work of Fitzgerald scholars Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks, who have brought many previously unpublished letters together with those published separately in Scott and Zelda’s collected writings, the story of their love can be given in their own letters. Introduced by an extensive narrative of the Fitzgeralds,  they are beautifully illustrated throughout with a selection of both familiar and unpublished photographs.

Click here to read a review.

‘Heartbreaking ... love has seldom seemed more poignant’ —Sunday Times

‘A good source for uncovering the truth ... the correspondence speaks for itself and the editors allow readers to draw their own conclusions’ —Daily Telegraph

‘Superbly edited and evocatively illustrated’ —Sunday Telegraph

‘The letters are beautifully organised, with clear and illuminating biographical exposition in between. Readers are given the written evidence from which to make up their own minds about responsibility and blame’ —Literary Review

‘Scott and Zelda's letters make it clear that both of them knew they had wasted their youth, beauty and early success. And both of them understood that they were bound together’ —Independent on Sunday

Neil Simon (1927-2018) began as a writer for some of the leading comedians of the day-including Jackie Gleason, Red Buttons, Phil Silvers, and Jerry Lewis-and he wrote for fabled television programs alongside a group of writers that included Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart, Michael Stewart, and Sid Caesar. After television, Simon embarked on a playwriting career. In the next four decades he saw twenty-eight of his plays and five musicals produced on Broadway. Thirteen of those plays and three of the musicals ran for more than five hundred performances. He was even more widely known for his screenplays-some twenty-five in all. Yet, despite this success, it was not until his BB Trilogy-Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues, and Broadway Bound-that critics and scholars began to take Simon seriously as a literary figure. This change in perspective culminated in 1991 when his play Lost in Yonkers won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In the twenty-two interviews included in Conversations with Neil Simon, Simon talks candidly about what it was like to write commercially successful plays that were dismissed by critics and scholars. He also speaks at length about the differences between writing for television, for the stage, and for film. He speaks openly and often revealingly about his relationships with, among many others, Mike Nichols, Walter Matthau, Sid Caesar, and Jack Lemmon. Above all, these interviews reveal Neil Simon as a writer who thought long and intelligently about creating for stage, film, and television, and about dealing with serious Subjects in a comic mode. In so doing, Conversations with Neil Simon compels us to recognize Neil Simon's genius.

A prolific playwright, Sam Shepard (1943-2017) wrote fifty-six produced plays, for which he won many awards, including a Pulitzer Prize. He was also a compelling, Oscar-nominated film actor, appearing in scores of films. Shepard also published eight books of prose and poetry and was a director (directing the premiere productions of ten of his plays as well as two films); a musician (a drummer in three rock bands); a horseman; and a plain-spoken intellectual. The famously private Shepard gave a significant number of interviews over the course of his public life, and the interviewers who respected his boundaries found him to be generous with his time and forthcoming on a wide range of topics. The selected interviews in Conversations with Sam Shepard begin in 1969 when Shepard, already a multiple Obie winner, was twenty-six and end in 2016, eighteen months before his death from complications of ALS at age seventy-three. In the interim, the voice, the writer, and the man evolved, but there are themes that echo throughout these conversations: the indelibility of family; his respect for stage acting versus what he saw as far easier film acting; and the importance of music to his work. He also speaks candidly of his youth in California, his early days as a playwright in New York City, his professionally formative time in London, his interests and influences, the mythology of the American Dream, his own plays, and more. In Conversations with Sam Shepard, the playwright reveals himself in his own words.

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 master at writing about the duality of human experience-the beautiful and the grotesque, the cruel and the loving. This duality provokes in Henley both amazement and compassion. She discusses here not only her admiration for Chekhov and other influences, but also her process of bringing a play from notebooks of images and bits of dialogues through rumination, writing, and rewriting to rehearsals and previews. The 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 in the most recent interview, is "such a life worth living: to be in tune with the creative process.

The author of such classics as "Our Town" and "The Bridge of San Luis Rey," Thornton Wilder was a born storyteller and dramatist--rare talents on glorious display in this volume of more than three hundred letters he penned to a vast array of famous friends and beloved relatives. Through Wilder's correspondence, readers can eavesdrop on his conversations with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, NoEl Coward, Gene Tunney, Laurence Olivier, Aaron Copland, Paul Hindemith, Leonard Bernstein, Edward Albee, and Mia Farrow. Equally absorbing are Wilder's intimate letters to his family.

Wilder tells of roller-skating with Walt Disney, remembers an inaugural reception for FDR at the White House, describes his life as a soldier in two World Wars, and recalls dining out with Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. In these pages, Thornton Wilder speaks for himself in his own unique, enduring voice--informing, encouraging, instructing, and entertaining with his characteristic wit, heart, and exuberance.

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 gave from 1984 to 2004. In the interviews, the playwright covers at length and in detail his plays and his background. He comments as well on such subjects as the differences between African Americans and whites, his call for more black theater companies, and his belief that African Americans made a mistake in assimilating themselves into the white mainstream. He also talks about his major influences, what he calls his "four B's"--the blues, writers James Baldwin and Amiri Baraka, and painter Romare Bearden. Wilson also discusses his writing process and his multiple collaborations with director Lloyd Richards.

Throughout, Wilson is candid, expansive, and provocative, displaying in these exchanges his willingness to confront controversial topics just as he did in his plays.

Jackson R. Bryer is professor emeritus of English at the University of Maryland. Mary C. Hartig teaches English at Montgomery College and is the coeditor, with Jackson R. Bryer, of "Facts on File Companion to American Drama."

Years after his death, F. Scott Fitzgerald continues to captivate both the popular and the critical imagination. This collection of essays presents fresh insights into his writing, discussing neglected texts and approaching familiar works from new perspectives.

Seventeen scholarly articles deal not only with Fitzgerald's novels but with his stories and essays as well, considering such topics as the Roman Catholic background of "The Beautiful and Damned" and the influence of Mark Twain on Fitzgerald's work and self-conception. The volume also features four personal essays by Fitzgerald's friends Budd Schulberg, Frances Kroll Ring, publisher Charles Scribner III, and writer George Garrett that shed new light on his personal and professional lives. Together these contributions demonstrate the continued vitality of Fitzgerald's work and establish new directions for ongoing discussions of his life and writing.

Known today primarily as the author of "Our Town, " probably America's most beloved and widely produced play, Thornton Wilder is the only writer ever to be honored with Pulitzer Prizes in both fiction and drama. This collection of interviews with Wilder covers the full range of his sixty-year career as one of America's leading men of letters.

In addition to American interviews, this book includes translations of interviews published originally in French and German that have never appeared in English previously. It includes a transcription of a rare radio interview conducted by Rex Stout and an extensive Paris Review conversation between Wilder and Richard H. Goldston, his first biographer. Throughout this book is a sense of Wilder's boundless curiosity, his wit, his unflagging energy, his friendships with a range of celebrities such as Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, and Gene Tunney, and above all, the multitude of subjects on which he conversed easily and brilliantly.

"Conversations with Thornton Wilder" provides a close-up encounter with Wilder as novelist, playwright, actor, director, teacher, scholar, world traveler, musician, raconteur, and friend of the famous. The earliest interview included was given in 1928, when his most acclaimed and commercially successful novel, The Bridge at San Luis Rey, won him his first Pulitzer Prize. From the 1930s and 1940s come Wilder's comments on his two celebrated plays, "Our Town" and "The Skin of Our Teeth," both Pulitzer winners. In the last three decades of his life, WIlder returned to the novel form ("The Eighth Day" won the National Book Award) while continuing to write plays and give his opinions on theater-in-the-round, the hippie movement, movies and television, and Communism.

This volume includes twenty-six conversations with Lillian Hellman, ranging from early newspaper interviews on the occasions of the Broadway openings of her plays through extended talks with her which appears in the "Paris Review," "Esquire," and "Rolling Stone," down to her last interviews in the early 1980s.

In all these interviews, Miss Hellman gives her own account of her eventful and exciting life, her evaluations and analyses of her plays and accounts of how and why they came to be written. Throughout, her views are expressed with the pungency, directness, honesty, and wit which made Lillian Hellman such a universally admired and respected figure.

Hellman was seldom far from where the action was. The controversies in which she was involved are equaled only by the honors she received. This volume supplements her own memories by providing her own account of her life as she lived it--rather than from the vantage of the late 1960s and 1970s when she composed the memoirs.

"Praise for the earlier edition:
""Students of modern American literature have for some years turned to "Fifteen Modern American Authors "(1969) as an indispensable guide to significant scholarship and criticism about twentieth-century American writers. In its new form--"Sixteenth Modern American Authors"--it will continue to be indispensable. If it is not a desk-book for all Americanists, it is a book to be kept in the forefront of the bibliographical compartment of their brains."--"American Studies"
"An indispensable research took (has) maintained and even increased its indispensability. No reference department of any college library should be without this latest revision."--"Choice"

F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, has frequently been dismissed as an outlier and curiosity in his oeuvre, a transitional work from the coming-of-age plot of This Side of Paradise to the masterful critique of American aspiration in The Great Gatsby The Beautiful and Damned belongs to a genre that is widely misunderstood, the "bright young things" novel in which spoiled and wealthy characters succumb to decay because of their privilege and lack of purpose. Set between 1913 and 1922, Fitzgerald's longest novel touches on many of the decisive issues that mark the passage from the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era into the Jazz Age: conspicuous consumption, income inequality, yellow journalism, the Great War, the rise of the movie industry, automobile travel, Wall Street stock scams, immigration and xenophobia, and the fixation with youth and aging. Published to coincide with the novel's centennial in 2022, this collection approaches The Beautiful and Damned for its insights more than its faults. Prominent Fitzgerald scholars analyze major themes and reveal unappreciated issues with attention to history, biography, literary influence, gender studies, and narratology. While acknowledging the novel's shortcomings, the essayists illustrate that The Beautiful and Damned has much more to say about its milieu than previously recognized. This collection provides a guide for understanding Fitzgerald's aims while demonstrating the richness of ideas that this novel explores, alongside the anxieties and ambitions that reverberate within it.