Interview Series
| "The interviews in The Paris Review are about as canonical, in our literary universe, as spoken words can be. They long ago set the standard for what well-brewed conversation should sound like on the page." |
| —Dwight Garner, The New York Times |
An interview with E. M. Forster—an acquaintance of Plimpton's from his days at King's College, Cambridge—became the first in a long series of now-legendary author interviews. Now known as the Writers at Work series, the Paris Review interviews quickly became a trademark of the magazine, lauded for their groundbreaking insights into the life and craft of the writer. Despite their venerable history, some of the interviews succeeded almost in spite of themselves: Graham Greene’s interview almost ended before it began when one of the interviewers turned up hungover and threw up in his hat on Greene’s doorstep; Nabokov's was cut short when Jeopardy! came on.
Early interview subjects include W. H. Auden, John Berryman, Saul Bellow, Jorge Luis Borges, William S. Burroughs, Truman Capote, John Cheever, Isak Dinesen, T. S. Eliot, Ralph Ellison, Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg, Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Heller, Kerouac, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Marianne Moore, Nabokov, Joyce Carol Oates, Dorothy Parker, Harold Pinter, Irwin Shaw, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, Evelyn Waugh, E. B. White, William Carlos Williams and P. G. Wodehouse.
More recent interviews include Woody Allen, Maya Angelou, John Ashbery, James Baldwin, Elizabeth Bishop, Ray Bradbury, Joseph Brodsky, Raymond Carver, R. Crumb, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, Louise Erdrich, Jonathan Franzen, William Gaddis, Seamus Heaney, Michel Houellebecq, Eugene Ionesco, Milan Kundera, Fran Lebowitz, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ian McEwan, Arthur Miller, David Mitchell, Haruki Murakami, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Stephen Sondheim, Susan Sontag, George Steiner and Hunter S. Thompson.
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