SOURCE: In an interview in Book Forum, Vol. V, No. 4, 1981, pp. 534-40.

In the following interview, which was conducted in 1980 while Howe was the Visiting Hurst Professor in the English department at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, Howe comments on literature, education, and socialism.

[Greenberg]: Mr. Howe, you recently described current novels as thin, lacking in substance and morality. Do you believe the novel as a form is exhausted?

[Howe]: I think it is presumptuous for critics or anyone else to speak of the exhaustion of a form that has been so rich and fruitful as the novel has been. All literary forms go through high and low points, plateaus and planes, and right now we seem to be experiencing what I take to be a plane. This is a judgment that other critics would probably call into question or deny, and it is possible that what...