Lawrence Durrell: Conversations

by Lawrence Durrell, Earl G. Ingersoll (Editor)

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.

261 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1998

About the author

Lawrence George Durrell was a critically hailed and beloved novelist, poet, humorist, and travel writer best known for The Alexandria Quartet novels, which were ranked by the Modern Library as among the greatest works of English literature in the twentieth century. A passionate and dedicated writer from an early age, Durrell’s prolific career also included the groundbreaking Avignon Quintet, whose first novel, Monsieur (1974), won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and whose third novel, Constance (1982), was nominated for the Booker Prize. He also penned the celebrated travel memoir Bitter Lemons of Cyprus (1957), which won the Duff Cooper Prize. Durrell corresponded with author Henry Miller for forty-five years, and Miller influenced much of his early work, including a provocative and controversial novel, The Black Book (1938). Durrell died in France in 1990.

The time Lawrence spent with his family, mother Louisa, siblings Leslie, Margaret Durrell, and Gerald Durrell, on the island of Corfu were the subject of Gerald's memoirs and have been filmed numerous times for TV.

Reviews

[Guillermo Carvajal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un gran libro de entrevistas con mi escritor favorito. Se hace corto, por supuesto, aunque lo he leído todo lo lentamente posible