You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

for you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

I'm talking today to Barry Giffatt, and this is Bookworm.

I'm talking today to Barry Gifford, and he is the author most recently of Wild at Heart,

a novel just published by Grove Weidenfeld, subtitled The Story of Sailor and Lula. The book has created something of a furor because of an explosive and one hears controversial film of the book, also called Wild at Heart, has been directed by David Lynch and won the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival recently. We'll be talking about that as we go along in. When I first met your work, you were writing very much of the road.

It was a book about Jack Kerouac's hometown, which was your hometown, too.

No?

Jack was from Lowell, Massachusetts. I grew up in Florida and in Chicago.

Uh-huh, but you were drawn to American road novelists and writers.

I was drawn to Kerouac in particular. The book you're talking about was called Kerouac's Town.

I wrote it originally as a piece for the Yale Literary Magazine in 1973.

And I was expanded eventually with Lawrence Lee into Jack's book, an oral biography of Jack Kerouac, which is still in print.

And I was drawn to Kerouac as a writer and as a person, not to the

beats per se, but to him as a great American author. What about Carowac was it that drew you?

Well, I think that I identified with him in the sense that both of us were scholar athletes

in a way. We'd both gone to university on athletic scholarships

and were both writers.

And there aren't too many of these beasts out there, I guess.

And the sensibility, of course, that Karowak evinced in his books.

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