Hortense Calisher Critical Essay | Interview by Hortense Calisher with Allan Gurganus, Pamela McCordick, and Mona Simpson

Interview by Hortense Calisher with Allan Gurganus, Pamela McCordick, and Mona Simpson

SOURCE: “The Art of Fiction C: Hortense Calisher,” in Paris Review, No. 105, Winter, 1987, pp. 157-87.

In the following interview, Calisher discusses her early life, diverse family influences, literary beginnings, and the themes, preoccupations, and creative processes behind her writing.

Hortense Calisher was born in Manhattan in 1911. She writes with great affection and authority about New York then and now—a city as textured, compact and allusive as her best prose. On the page, her memories of her upper-bourgeois childhood always exercise a power and specificity, a great charm.

Her publishing career began somewhat belatedly at the age of thirty-seven when, while she was living in the suburbs with her first husband and two children, her early stories started to attract attention. Recognition has remained consistent if sometimes merely respectful. Perhaps no evaluation of a single Calisher work does justice to the author’s collective range, to her ease in...
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