SOURCE: Brodkey, Harold, and James Linville. “Harold Brodkey: The Art of Fiction CXXVI.” Paris Review 121, no. 33 (winter 1991): 51-91.

In the following interview, Brodkey discusses his time at Harvard, his creative process, and his attitude toward fame.

For the past thirty years Harold Brodkey has pursued a path unique in American letters. After publication of a volume of finely made short stories written in his twenties, First Love and Other Sorrows (1958), many of which first appeared in The New Yorker and were acknowledged to be of outstanding promise, Brodkey began composition of an extended prose work, portions of which have been published in magazines and journals, and which have provoked a wide diversity of critical opinion—from Denis Donoghue's claim in Vanity Fair that it is a “work of genius” to suggestions that it may be a bloated hoax. In the meantime, the work became something of an object...