SOURCE: Lessing, Doris, and Jonah Raskin. “An Interview with Doris Lessing.” Progressive 63, no. 6 (June 1999): 36-9.

In the following interview, Lessing discusses her observations on feminism, the 1960s, fame, and spiritual fads, as well as her thoughts on privacy, death, and the end of the twentieth century.

Fifty years after migrating from provincial South Africa to London to become a novelist, Doris Lessing is still writing on a manual typewriter—though not, of course, on the same machine she used for her first novel, The Grass Is Singing (1950). No typewriter could have survived the relentless pounding necessary to produce the forty or so internationally acclaimed books that have appeared over the past fifty years, including The Golden Notebook (1962), a strange and beautiful novel that is often called “a bible for feminists,” though the label distresses Lessing herself. It's an extraordinary literary achievement by anyone's standards, but perhaps especially so...