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Arriving in New York at the tail end of what has been termed the "Golden Age" of Broadway and the start of the Off Broadway theater movement, Terrence McNally (1938-2020) first established himself as a dramatist of the absurd and a biting social critic. He quickly recognized, however, that one is more likely to change people's minds by first changing their hearts, and--in outrageous farces like The Ritz and It's Only a Play--began using humor more broadly to challenge social biases. By the mid-1980s, as the emerging AIDS pandemic called into question America's treatment of persons isolated by suffering and sickness, he became the theater's great poet of compassion, dramatizing the urgent need of human connection and the consequences when such connections do not take place. Conversations with Terrence McNally collects nineteen interviews with the celebrated playwright. In these interviews, one hears McNally reflect on theater as the most collaborative of the arts, the economic pressures that drive the theater industry, the unique values of music and dance, and the changes in American theater over McNally's fifty-plus year career. The winner of four competitive Tony Awards as the author of the Best Play (Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master Class) and author of the book for the Best Musical (Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime), McNally holds the distinction of being one of the few writers for the American theater who excelled in straight drama as well as musical comedy. In addition, his canon extends to opera; his collaboration with composer Jake Heggie, Dead Man Walking, has proven the most successful new American opera of the last twenty-five years.

Interviews with the queer Jamaican-born Canadian speculative fiction writer and editor known for her novels Brown Girl in the Ring, Midnight Robber, The Salt Roads, The New Moon's Arms, The Chaos, and Sister Mine

Ken Kesey (1935-2001) is the author of several works of well-known fiction and other hard-to-classify material. These interviews trace his arc through success, fame, prison, farming, and tragedy. These conversations make clear Kesey's central place in American culture and offer his enduring lesson that the freedom exists to create lives as wildly as can be imagined.

With roots in the American South, Beth Henley (b. 1952) has for four decades been a working playwright and screenwriter. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 at the age of twenty-eight, Henley so far has written twenty-five produced plays that are always original, usually darkly comic, and often experimental. In these interviews, Henley speaks of the plays, from her early crowd-pleasers, Crimes of the Heart and The Miss Firecracker Contest, to her more experimental plays, including The Debutante Ball and Control Freaks, to her brilliant and time-bending play, The Jacksonian. Henley is a master at writing about the duality of human experience--the beautiful and the grotesque, the cruel and the loving. This duality provokes in Henley both amazement and compassion. She discusses here not only her admiration for Chekhov and other influences, but also her process of bringing a play from notebooks of images and bits of dialogues through rumination, writing, and rewriting to rehearsals and previews. The interviews range from 1981, just before she won the Pulitzer Prize, to 2020 and cover nearly forty years of a creative life, which, as Henley remarks in the most recent interview, is "such a life worth living: to be in tune with the creative process."

Jerry W. Ward Jr. (b. 1943) has published nonfiction, literary criticism, encyclopedias, anthologies, and poetry. Ward is also a highly respected scholar with a specialty in African American literature and has been recognized internationally as one of the leading experts on Richard Wright. Ward was Lawrence Durgin Professor of Literature at Tougaloo College, served as a member of both the Mississippi Humanities Council and the Mississippi Advisory Committee for the US Commission on Civil Rights, and cofounded the Richard Wright Circle and the Richard Wright Newsletter. He has won numerous awards, and in 2001 he was inducted into the International Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent. Conversations with Jerry W. Ward Jr. aims to add an indispensable source to American literature and African American studies. It offers an account of Ward's intelligent and thoughtful responses to questions about literature, literary criticism, teaching, writing, civil rights, Black aesthetics, race, and culture. Throughout the fourteen interviews collected in this volume that range from 1995 to 2021, Ward demonstrates his responsibilities as a contemporary scholar, professor, writer, and social critic. His charming personality glimmers through these interviews, which, in a sense, are inner views that allow us to see into his mind, understand his heart, and appreciate his wit.

When Jimmy Carter (b. 1924) lost the presidency in 1980, it would have been reasonable to think his public life was coming to an end. The moderate, evangelical, blue-jeans-wearing peanut farmer made an unlikely governor of Georgia, and an even less likely winner of the vicious 1976 Democratic presidential primary. Coming into an era of American politics where evangelical and rural voters became increasingly identified with the Reagan revolution, and the Democratic Party's identity became increasingly secular and urban, he did not fit neatly into the political categories of the emerging decade. But it was not politics that would define President Carter in the end: it would be his humble Christian faith and his enduring commitment to the poor, to peace, and to human rights. In Conversations with Jimmy Carter, ten interviews, drawn from Carter's five decades as a national public figure and author, capture the complexities and contradictions that have defined him--and that have helped to both reflect and shape the highest aspirations of the American experiment.

On the strength of a National Book Award for his novel Going After Cacciato and a widely acclaimed short-story cycle, The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien (b. 1946) cemented his reputation as one of the most compelling chroniclers of Vietnam--and, in the process, was cast as a "Vietnam writer." But to confine O'Brien to a single piece of ground or a particular style is to ignore the broad sweep of a career spanning nearly four decades. In addition to detailed discussions of all of O'Brien's work--a memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone, and seven books of fiction--the sixteen interviews and profiles in Conversations with Tim O'Brien explore common themes, with subtle differences. Looming large is the experience of Vietnam and its influence as well as O'Brien's youth in Minnesota and the expectations of a midwestern upbringing. Interviews allowed the writer to fully examine the shifting boundaries of truth and identity, memory, and imagination in fiction; the role of war in society; gender issues; and the craft of writing. O'Brien approaches each of these topics and a host of others with a directness and an evident passion that will resonate with both readers and prospective writers.