“Do You Use a Pencil or a Pen?”: Author Interviews as Literary Advice

This chapter examines the relationship between author interviews and literary advice across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It draws on case studies in the form of two interview series: the interwar “How Writers Work” series, published in the British periodical Everyman, and the “Art of Fiction” series, published in the American magazine The Paris Review from 1953 onward. It also discusses the explosion of author interviews in the era of online media. The chapter argues that the author interview is an expansive form, encouraging readers of all types to bring their own agendas and reading styles to the text, including but not limited to reading for advice. The very ambiguity of the relationship between author interviews and literary advice has in fact worked in the former’s favor: enabling it to gain both popularity and prestige in an era of professionalized literary studies.