His books explore the world of nature and the practice of solitude. Much of his work centers on life in Montana's remote Yaak Valley, an ecosystem threatened by commerical logging. Friday, May 26 Terry Tempest Williams , writer and activist, is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Lannan Literary Fellowship in creative nonfiction. Her newest book, Leap, will be published this year. Click here to print out the ticket order form.
Research is exhaustive and scrupulous.
What I do is idiosyncratic. Perhaps the relative freedom Mr. Doctorow has afforded himself as an artist rather than a historian has allowed him to create such an authentic, personal vision of the American experience. Mr. Doctorow has often described his activity as a writer as a form of rebellion against a prevalent American mythology that is often inaccurate or poorly rendered. As a young staff reader for Columbia Pictures in the late 50s, he was inspired to write his first novel, the western, Welcome to Hard Times. I had to suffer one lousy western after another, and it occurred to me that I could lie about the West in a much more interesting way than any of these people were lying.