Customer Reviews

The Spoken Word: American Writers, 3-CD Set (British Library - British Library Sound Archive)

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I got this for my wife, and we have both listened through it. Some of the interviews -- such as the ones with James Baldwin and Nabokov -- are fabulous, make you feel like you've just invited the most interesting person in the world over for dinner. But many of the early ones are hard to hear, some of them (Raymond Chanlder) don't have much to say, and the BBC interviewer(s), through the years, seem to have focused inordinately on the more surface-y aspects of the writers and their writing. Lots of questions about fame, about reputation, quoting to them some line from a forgotten review and asking them to respond to it, etc.

Given that one has James Thurber or Lillian Hellman sitting across the microphone, I would wish that the conversation had been more...edifying. So all in all, I'd say this is a collection for those who really, really need to hear what Eugene O'Neill sounded like. But I doubt you'll listen to it more than once.

I see the product summary doesn't actually contain a complete list of writers who appear in this set, so here it is:

Disc 1
1. Gertrude Stein
2. Sinclair Lewis
3. Anita Loos
4. Raymond Chandler
5. Eugene O'Neill
6. Henry Miller
7. Pearl Buck
8. James Thurber
9. F. Scott Fitzgerald

Disc 2
1. Thornton Wilder
2. Vladimir Nabokov
3. John Steinbeck
4. Isaac Bashevis Singer
5. Lillian Hellman
6. James Michener
7. Eudora Welty
8. Tennessee Williams
9. Mary McCarthy

Disc 3
1. William S. Burroughs
2. Ralph Ellison
3. Saul Bellow
4. Arthur Miller
5. Patricia Highsmith
6. James Baldwin
7. William Styron
8. Gore Vidal
9. Toni Morrison

Those who enjoy this set might also be interested in other British Library recordings like The Spoken Word: British Writers along with the various CDs devoted to particular writers like The Spoken Word: Sylvia Plath, or The Spoken Word: American Poets and The Spoken Word: British Poet, or Voices of History: Vol 1 and Voices of History: Vol 2.

This is a wonderful cd for people who enjoy hearing the voices of the writers themselves. Many great recordings. I just wish some of the cuts were longer.