A writing course can only give you a start, and help a little. Look at those people who go back year after year to summer writers’ conferences, you get so you can pick them out a mile away. What value has the creative writing course for young writers? But after “Typhoon and the Tor Bay” I didn’t give writing another thought until I went to Duke University and landed in a creative writing course under William Blackburn.

I gave it the full treatment.Īnd how did you happen to start? That is, why did you want to write? I wrote an imitation Conrad thing, “Typhoon and the Tor Bay” it was called, you know, a ship’s hold swarming with crazy Chinks. I figure I must have been about thirteen. You were about to tell us when you started to write. He is a young man of good appearance, though not this afternoon he is a little paler than is healthy in this quiet hour when the denizens of the quarter lie hiding, their weak night eyes insulted by the light. L’Eau qui fait pschitt! The sun reflects strongly off their vivid colors, and Styron, shading his eyes, peers down into his coffee.

go home! An adjoining poster advertises carbonated water. They are behind bars, and the caption reads: Take your vacation in happy Russia! The lower part of the poster has been ripped and scarred and plastered with stickers shouting: Les Américans en Amérique! U.S. Across the boulevard from the café and its sidewalk tables, a red poster portrays a skeletal family.

He was interviewed in Paris, in early autumn, at Patrick’s, a café on the boulevard Montparnasse, which has little to distinguish it from its neighbors-the Dome, the Rotonde, Le Chapelain-except a faintly better brand of coffee. This novel, published three years ago, won Styron immediate standing about the best of contemporary writers, and besides critical acclaim gained him the Prix de Rome for Literature. He was born 28 years ago in Newport News, Virginia, a section he grew up in and which provided the locale for his first novel- Lie Down in Darkness.

William Styron is the first of the ‘young writers’ to be interviewed by this magazine. Interviewed by Peter Matthiessen & George Plimpton Issue 5, Spring 1954

Plimpton stein book