George Plimpton

Oct 9, 2024 | bobmorris.biz | George Plimpton

What follows is yet another literary form, often referred to as “oral biography” (which also sounds like a prescription for a nonspecific disease), in which various voices are knitted together to form a whole. A more accurate term might be “oral narrative.” It reveals new details about Capote’s unusual style of reporting, his extraordinary impact on a small Kansas community, and his conduct on the day the killers went to the gallows. “Do the easy one,” I said.

Jan 4, 2024 | theparisreview.org | Nancy Crampton |George Plimpton

Interviewed by George Plimpton This interview with Joe Heller took place during the week of the publication of Something Happened—a literary event of considerable significance, because the novel is only the second of the author’s career. The first, of course, was Catch-22.

Nov 17, 2023 | theparisreview.org | George Plimpton

Terry Southern’s interview with the English novelist Henry Green (born Henry Yorke) has been an in-house favorite atThe Paris Review ever since it appeared in our nineteenth issue (Summer 1958). If Green was, in Southern’s borrowed description, a “writer’s writer’s writer,” theirs is an interviewer’s interview: an essay in dialogue form, with Southern playing the brash young Texas hipster and Green playing the Old Etonian toff—deliberately exaggerated versions of themselves.

Apr 3, 2023 | tinyurl.com | George Plimpton

Interviewed by George Plimpton Issue 159, Fall 2001 The big news, of course, is that Billy Collins has been appointed the new poet laureate by the Library of Congress, now the newest of a distinguished list that among others includes Robert Penn Warren, Joseph Brodsky, Robert Pinsky, and most recently, Stanley Kunitz. Collins’s credentials, despite starting a career as a poet at the late age of forty, are impressive indeed.