History of the Literary Interview: Charles Dickens (1812-1870) Died Before Authors Were Interviewed

“…Literary interviews became popular in the eighteen-eighties…In the early eighteen-nineties, Henry James wrote in his notebook about ‘this age of advertisement and newspaperism, this age of interviewing’…Some sixty years later, a new age of interviewing dawned. The first issue of The Paris Review, published in the spring of 1953, contained a lengthy interview with E. M. Forster that would set the pattern for the magazine’s legendary ‘Writers at Work’ series…[In the] twenty-first century…unless you’re Thomas Pynchon, [authors give] interviews after the publication of every book: to newspapers and Web sites, on the radio, in bookshops, and at literary festivals. Not that writers these days are any more pleased about giving interviews than James was. ‘A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him,’ Joyce Carol Oates said in a Washington Post interview earlier this year…”

Hannah Rosefield. “No More Questions.” The New Yorker, January 2, 2014.