Ruas conducted interviews with 14 contemporary writers who talk about the nature of their craft, their individual strengths and dilemmas, about writers they admire, their need to work, and about themselves. Tennesse Williams speaks on the American theater public, Marguerite Young on literary New York during the '40s, midwestern writers and Utopian literature; Norman Mailer rails at the mass dehumanization of our times and talks of the vicissitudes of his own career; Joseph Heller evokes the spirit and pleasures of his Coney Island boyhood; Paul Theroux talks of Americans abroad; William Burroughs talks of Paris in the '50s, the Olympia Press and the issue of obscenity; and Scott Spencer talks of the experience of having a film based on Endless Love. Other writers interviewed include: Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Eudora Welty, Robert Stone, Susan Sontag, E.L. Doctorow and Toni Morrison. ISBN 0-394-52787-9 : $17.95.