SOURCE: Apple, Max, Larry McCaffery, and Sinda Gregory. “An Interview with Max Apple.” In Alive and Writing, pp. 26–45. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

In the following interview with McCaffery and Gregory, conducted March 17, 1983, Apple discusses his narrative style, thematic concerns, and creative processes.

Born and raised in the center of America's Midwest, Max Apple is, at heart and in his fiction, an emigré. With an outsider's eye for the incongruous, for irreconcilable peculiarities, he manages to penetrate the mythological world that shimmers just beyond the golden arches, the orange roofs, the magic kingdoms that line our main streets and freeways. No writer is better at examining the middle ground between the ideal and the reality of the American Dream, because few others have such a real appreciation for the ambition and the magnitude of the Dream, or such a basic understanding of the impossibility of its fulfillment. In...