SOURCE: "The Art of Fiction: S. J. Perelman," in S. J. Perelman: Critical Essays, edited by Steven H. Gale, Garland Publishing, 1992, pp. 3-16.

In the following interview, originally published in 1963, Perelman discusses his influences, association with Hollywood, and the seriousness of his humorous style.

S. J. Perelman has an eighty-acre farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania (where the house is "shingled with secondhand wattles"), a Greenwich Village apartment, and a no-nonsense, one-room office, also in the Village. It was there that the interview took place. The office is furnished like a slightly luxuriant monk's cell: a few simple chairs, a desk, a cot. On the walls are a Stuart Davis water color and photographs of James Joyce, Somerset Maugham, and the late Gus Lobrano, a New Yorker editor and close friend of the author. The only bizarre touch is David Niven's hat from Around the World in Eighty Days...