Fraser, G. S.

This collection brings together for the first time over thirty interviews with one of the most fascinating major writers of the latter half of the twentieth century. The interviews demonstrate the range of his concerns over a period of four decades and mark the uniqueness of his voice as an author. The first interview, originally published in the Paris Review, reveals a Durrell launched into fame with the publication in the late 1950s of what continues to be his best-known work, The Alexandria Quartet. With the last interview, Durrell has completed The Avignon Quintet and his career as a novelist. In the thirty years between the appearance of these two conversations, he established his reputation as not only a novelist but also a poet, a writer of travel books, and even a playwright. This collection contains the elements expected of an author's responses to academics and representatives of the media. Durrell speaks of the influences on his early writing, especially what he learned from such radically different mentors as T. S. Eliot and Henry Miller, and of his efforts to free himself from work for the British Foreign Office in the first two decades of his adult life. He answers specific questions about most of his writings and indicates what he reconstructs as his intent in writing them.

"Dylan Thomas's life and work have made him a legendary figure since he died, amid alcohol and debts, in New York at the age of thirty-nine. At the heart of his achievement are a few dozen poems and stories which, together with the romantic comedy Under Milk Wood, haunt the imagination and give his writing a broader appeal than he could have envisaged. Beyond his writing is the chequered figure of the poet himself: often comic, at times in despair, always self-obsessed, in the end defeated by his own nature." "Paul Ferris's classic biography has been recognised as the standard life since it first appeared in 1977. He has now drawn on fresh material to revise the book. In particular, he looks again at Thomas's marriage to the fiery Caitlin, and finds in it the seeds of a fatal dependence."--BOOK JACKET.

An examination of the poet's life and works, side by side.