Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read? The cow goes moot. From KCRW, Santa Monica,

I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is bookworm. George Plimpton, founding editor of the Paris

Review, died in September 2003. Today, in his memory, we offer a conversation that first aired in 1998.

When we spoke, Mr. Plimpton's recent work was an oral biography of Truman Capote in which

various friends, enemies, advocates, and detractors recall Capote's turbulent career.

Now, I wanted to begin.

There was something I noticed about Capote and recognized it again when I was rereading the first paragraph of children on their birthdays, that this is a writer who wants to charm.

It's not just in the social world.

It's in the fiction.

He wants to make the reader say, I would die

to meet him. And he seems to be with J.G. Salinger, the writer who both wants to attract

in his writing, a huge fandom, and at the same time, in a certain certain way to spurn and resist them.

And I wondered if you could talk about those polls and Capote.

Well, I had not thought of Capote quite in that sense.

I would agree that he's an extraordinary stylist, which I suppose is a method, a net in which you try to catch your reader and absorb his interest.

And that might be the type of seduction that you're talking about.

I never heard him talk about seducing the reader.

I suppose every writer has to think a little bit about the person that picks up the book and reads it.

...