SOURCE: “The American Novelist and the Contemporary Scene: A Conversation Between John W. Aldridge and Wright Morris,” in Conversations with Wright Morris: Critical Views and Responses, edited by Robert E. Knoll, University of Nebraska Press, 1977, pp. 14-33.

In the following interview, Morris discusses his place in mid-twentieth-century fiction.

[Aldridge]: In your critical book, The Territory Ahead [1958], you talk about the American writer's difficulty in turning his experience into usable literary material; and you imply that he simply has too much material. I'd suggest that this has been the problem for American writers right up to your generation, but that now we have many novelists—people like Barth, Pynchon, Hawkes, Vonnegut—who don't seem to be making much direct use of American experience. They are turning more and more to what has been called fabulation, the creation of fables, the creation of fictions of fictions, parodies of fiction, and...