About the Author: Inside the Creative Process

By Nicholas Basbanes.

The final quarter of the last century was a period of extraordinary fervor in American letters—a time when post–World War II authors reached their peak and well before the Internet had eroded book publishing and changed everything.  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.  Because of his extensive knowledge of books and authors, two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and biographer David McCullough called Basbanes “the leading authority on books about books.”

 

About the Author: Inside the Creative Process collects together more than forty of Nicholas Basbanes’s interviews and essays that grew from this unique period of publishing.  The list 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 Kazin a few months before he died; and columnist Jimmy Breslin just after he had suffered an aneurysm—but who would continue to write for fifteen more years.

 

Perhaps no one has been more suited to this kind of reporting than Nicholas 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 collected together paint a remarkable picture of authors at the heights of their creativity.

 

With the loss of so many of these writers and the imposing behemoth called the Internet, this sort of collection may never again be culled from the morning papers.  As alive and refreshing as the day they were published, About the Author explores the creative process that was—and is—the foundation of books and publishing.

Mr. Basbanes is meant to be read, and so About the Author is smartly published in a trade edition. The trade edition is similarly produced to the earlier companion volume, Editions & Impressions.