Overview

With roots in the American South, Beth Henley (b. 1952) has for four decades been a working playwright and screenwriter. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 at the age of twenty-eight, Henley so far has written twenty-five produced plays that are always original, usually darkly comic, and often experimental. In these interviews, Henley speaks of the plays, from her early crowd-pleasers, Crimes of the Heart and The Miss Firecracker Contest, to her more experimental plays, including The Debutante Ball and Control Freaks, to her brilliant and time-bending play, The Jacksonian.

Henley is a master at writing about the duality of human experience-the beautiful and the grotesque, the cruel and the loving. This duality provokes in Henley both amazement and compassion. She discusses here not only her admiration for Chekhov and other influences, but also her process of bringing a play from notebooks of images and bits of dialogues through rumination, writing, and rewriting to rehearsals and previews. The interviews range from 1981, just before she won the Pulitzer Prize, to 2020 and cover nearly forty years of a creative life, which, as Henley remarks in the most recent interview, is "such a life worth living: to be in tune with the creative process."

ISBN-13

9781496844309

ISBN-10

1496844300

Weight

0.82 Pounds

Dimensions

6.00 x 0.63 x 9.00 In

List Price

$25.00

Format

Paperback

Pages

250 pages

Publisher

University Press of Mississippi

Published On

2023-03-24



View All Offers

Sort by:

Condition
Seller
Seller Comments
Price
Brand New
Seller details
Alibris
★★★★★

Sparks, NV, USA

Print on demand Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 250 p. Literary Conversations.
$40.42

 Free delivery by: 02 Apr 2026

Used, Good
Seller details
Bonita
★★★★☆

Santa Clarita, CA, USA

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items. May be an ex-library book.
$58.94

 Free delivery by: 02 Apr 2026


Bookstores.com relies on cookies to improve your experience.