The Paris Review Eagle, or “the bird” as it was referred to, was designed by William Pène du Bois, the magazine’s art editor, in the spring of 1952. The symbolism is not difficult: an American eagle is carrying a pen: the French association is denoted by the helmet the bird is wearing—actually a Phrygian hat originally given a slave on his freedom in ancient times and which subsequently became the liberty cap or bonnet rouge worn by the French Revolutionists of the 19th Century. 

Distressed by what he saw happening to Latin American journalism, Gabriel García Márquez, the Nobel laureate author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and a former newspaper reporter himself, started in March 1995 what he describes as “a school without walls.”

I was working for the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. This was after my junior year of high school and I spent two months in the woods, wandering up and down dry canyons, scouting rock-art sites, mapping them. I lived out of my backpack. 

1. I also enclose a brief statement of some of the facts of Mr. Wolfe's life, which will complete the answer to this question. He began to write for publication about three years before the publication of "Look Homeward Angel" which appeared in 1929. Before that he had written two plays but neither one was ever produced although those to whom they were submitted did discern the great talent of the man. Probably the play form is too precise and sharply limited for his sort of expansive genius.

A mother brought her girl to a sanatorium for sickly children and left. I was that girl.

The sanatorium looked over a big pond that was encircled by an autumnal park, with meadows and paths. The tall trees seemed ablaze with gold and copper; the scent of their falling leaves made the girl dizzy, after the city’s stench. 

I leave, for now, that scene that switched on a certain channel in my being.

What follows are the authors’ discussions on the first stirrings, the germination of a poem, or a work of fiction. Any number of headings would be appropriate: Beginnings, The Starting Point, etc. Inspiration would be as good as any.

I asked at reception for Mrs. Hamer. It always gave me pleasure to use her married name, not the name she was known by. She once told me some of the names she had used in her life to keep her life secret, and I forgot them. 

Terry Southern’s interview with the English novelist Henry Green (born Henry Yorke) has been an in-house favorite atThe Paris Review ever since it appeared in our nineteenth issue (Summer 1958). If Green was, in Southern’s borrowed description, a “writer’s writer’s writer,” theirs is an interviewer’s interview

  For almost a year, I have been helping the Waldenbooks Company in its efforts to get Americans to buy and read more books. One of the sad statistics of our society is that only 3% of the American public buys hard cover books. This points out that the home library, which was once such a staple for informed people, has lost much of its importance.