Literature and the Rise of the Interview by Rebecca Roach

Interviews are an important part in a reporter's life, because thanks to them, we enter in the existence of people and if these ones are collaborative, interviews are a successfull tool for rhe understanding of  the past and the present not just of that person but of the society where he/she lived in and she/he is living in. 

Literature and the Rise

of the Interview by Rebecca Roach takes in consideration the birth of the interview seeing it from the perspective of literary culture; interviews are more or less 150 years old and if now they are a compulsory instrument of communication where people love to tell their projects, latest movies, albums, facts if they are public characters not just in magazines and newsmagazines or TV but mainly in social medias, in the past the interview was lived as an important social and cultural tool for reaching readers.

Literature has discovered interviews in a traumatic way. A suffering passage. It had to be just a private conversation the one between Lowell and Julian Hawthorne, pity that the second one decided to release an interview. Lowell was consistently upset for the publication of his thoughts; that interview with Lowell was released without, apparently, his approval. The writer thought that that one was a conversation. Discovered this story and although pretty critical regarding the role of interviews, Henry James understood that something anyway was mutating in culture. 

He also understood the power of women in the sector although women, as always, weren't at all taken in consideration in their writings. If males journalists were taken in consideration and their pieces were important and discussed politically and socially, women, again, were behind, and they didn't appear credibles. Just because women, of course. In the Bostonians and other works by Henry James we find the work done by ladies and the meaning of the cultural changes that started to taking place in the sector.

Vanity Fair at the beginning of 1920s started to publish a series of imaginary interviews: the so-called "Impossible Interviews."

Hollywood noticed with great interest the power that a good interview could potentially have for promoting movies, actors, their work, passing through their projects and their private existence.

Everyman published at some point, we are at the end of 1920s and the beginning of 1930s "How Writers Work" a series of interviews and articles involving pretty diversified writers; from Rilke to Ellis, from Hemingway to D. H. Lawrence.

The readers of Everyman were engaged in expressing their questions, in a fertile debate about for example Joyce and his works, but always seeing books and writers in practical vantage point.

Interviews with the most diversified authors were friendly; Everyman felt the necessaity of let show the mutation that the market and literary genres started to produce.

There were problems of course and one of the most remembered, changing magazine and city, was the one met by The Paris Review when some people of their staff interviewed Jack Kerouac. Berrigan and two writers interviewed Kerouac. Kerouac evidently didn't love that fellowship and tried all his best for let them know that and vice-versa. In that case the interview is not anymore impersonal, but starts to be a sort of fight with the person you are interviewing.

The book treats also our times and new medias and online magazines.

Very interesting and engaging, it was a pleasure to read it and I suggest it to everyone interested in journalism or books. There are great suggestions in that sense. I prepared a long list of books and magazines I want to read.

I thank Oxford University Press for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori