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INTERVIEWER
Your belief in literature, your affection for it as a living force, goes back pretty far in your childhood. Did you read mostly the classics when you were a boy?
GARDNER
Not mostly—we had a lot of books. My mother was a schoolteacher and my father was a farmer who loved to read: classics, Shakespeare, and of course the Bible. They were great reciters of literature too. I’ve had visitors—sophisticated people—who’ve heard my father recite things and have been amazed at how powerfully be does it. It’s an old country tradition, but my father was and is the best. We’d be put to bed with a recital of poetry, things like that. At Grange meetings, for instance, my mother and father would do recitations as part of the evening’s entertainment. Or while my father was milking the cows my mother would come out and read something to him—Lear, say—leaving out the part of whomever my father felt like being that day, and he’d answer his lines from the cow.
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 Download a PDF of the full interview |
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| Authors Mentioned |
| John Barth, Samuel Beckett, Stanley Elkin, William Faulkner, John Fowles, William Gaddis, William Gass, Bernard Malamud, John Updike, William Blake, Geoffrey Chaucer, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Dante, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Homer, James Joyce, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Herman Melville, Friedrich Nietzsche, John O’Hara, Thomas Pynchon, Jean-Paul Sartre, William Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson, Octave Thanet, Leo Tolstoy |
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