Joan Didion and Kurt Vonnegut Had Something to Say. We Have It on Tape

Tom Wolfe was a fast talker. Eudora Welty had a musical Southern drawl. Kurt Vonnegut’s jokes got belly laughs.

Each of these authors once spoke to audiences at the 92nd Street Y Unterberg Poetry Center in New York City, which has hosted some of the most celebrated writers of the past several generations, from Isaac Asimov to Anaïs Nin and Kazuo Ishiguro to Margaret Atwood. Now, the Poetry Center has digitized audio recordings of its literary events stretching back to 1949 — hundreds of which have never been released before — in a collection that offers a glimpse into history and a taste of what the writers themselves were like in public.

In 1965, for example, the year before he became consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, James Dickey complained that his 14-year-old son had acquired a taste for rock ’n’ roll and a transistor radio. The sound of electric guitars had taken over his house. He was joined onstage that night by the poet Theodore Weiss, but it could have been Truman Capote, Joseph Heller or Adrienne Rich, who also visited the Poetry Center over the years.

More here.