About the Author: Inside the Creative Process

by Nicholas A. Basbanes

During the final quarter of the last century, writer Nicholas Basbanes, acclaimed author of A Gentle Madness, enjoyed the rare opportunity as literary editor of the Worcester, Massachusetts, Telegram & Gazette, to interview literally hundreds of authors passing through Boston on publicity tours."About the Inside the Creative Process" collects more than forty of Nicholas Basbanes's interviews and essays that includes novelists, biographers, poets, historians, and others who were regularly among the best-selling authors. In addition, "About the Author" publishes for the first time the full interviews with important writers such as novelists A. S. Byatt, Joseph Heller, Edna O'Brien, and Kurt Vonnegut; the critic Alfred Kazan a few months before he died; and columnist Jimmy Breslin.Perhaps no one has been more suited to this kind of reporting than Basbanes. Using the skills of an experienced interviewer and the considered analysis of an impartial critic, Basbanes pioneered a new kind of journalism for his weekly column. These pieces paint a remarkable picture of authors at the heights of their creativity.

Genres: Writing, Books About Books, Nonfiction

246 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 15, 2010

About the author

Nicholas A. Basbanes is an award-winning investigative journalist and was literary editor of the Worcester Sunday Telegram. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and Smithsonian, and he is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. Basbanes lives in North Grafton, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Steven · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel unfair in saying this, but I was disappointed by this book for two reasons.

The title suggested to me that this would be more details on authors' creative processes. What I found was a collection of Basbanes' interviews with many authors and not really a focused work on how authors work.

The author's previous books have all been insightful and incisive looks at book publishing and collecting, so perhaps my expectations were set higher than they should be to evaluate a new book.

Still, this collection was an interesting read in small doses of 2-4 pages with each author. For me, the highlights of the book are Basbanes' interviews with A.S. Byatt, Louis L'Amour, Arthur Miller, and Neil Simon; I'm still unsure if I enjoyed the Alfred Kazin interview due to what I got out of it or if the interviewee simply came off as an argumentative grump.

[Joseph Hageman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thoughtful interviews and enjoyable. I learned a lot about the writers' approaches.

[Jamie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was really excited about this book. Anne Fadiman writes in "Ex Libris" about how everyone has what she calls their "odd shelf," that shelf of books that doesn't really fit with the rest of their library. I'm not sure if it's so odd, but I would say my odd shelf is a combination of grammar/style guides and books of writers talking about the craft of writing.

This should have been in my wheelhouse, but instead I found it a little slapdash and strange. It's a collection of pieces and interviews that Basbanes published in the newspapers he worked for throughout his career. It's arranged alphabetically, and it's a who's-who of modern and postmodern writers. But he doesn't update anything. Everything is put in as-is, meaning that the book reprints an interview with Toni Morrison from 1981, before she had written some of her seminal works, and only gives a four line synopsis of Morrison's career. Michael Chabon is interviewed at the time of the publication of "Wonder Boys," and the end of the piece talks about how he's working on a new novel, that will be set in Manhattan and involve the heyday of comic books. Yet Basbanes doesn't finish the piece with, "Oh, yeah, that was Kavalier and Clay, and it won him a Pulitzer." If you don't know about the writer in question, you will finish the piece with an incomplete view of their place in history.

This is not worthy of my odd shelf.