Lawrence Durrell: Conversations

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.