The DNA of Literature

The legendary literary journal The Paris Review is in the process of putting free online their more than 50 years of interviews with the greatest masters of 20th century letters. Everyone is here. Everyone but Salinger and Pynchon, but that would be expecting a miracle.

The 1950's include inter alia: Lawrence Durrell, Graham Greene, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway.

The 1960's feature: Wm. S. Burroughs, Robert Frost, Robert Graves, Aldous Huxley, Robert Lowell, Henry Miller, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Celine, Jean Cocteau, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Arthur Miller, Ezra Pound, John Steinbeck, Simone de Beauvoir, and many more.

The 1970's are represented by: William Gass, Joseph Heller, Christopher Isherwood, Bernard Malamud, Joyce Carol Oates, Gore Vidal, Eudora Welty, W.H. Auden, Joan Didion, John Gardner, Pablo Neruda, Charles Olson, Jean Rhys, Anne Sexton, Kurt Vonnegut, and others.

1980 through the 2000's will be put online between December of this year and April of 2006. Each interview is long, most are 20 to 50 page PDFs.

I have only mentioned some of my favorites, I encourage you to visit their website to view the entire list. You will not be disappointed.