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Henry Louis Mencken joined the staff of the Baltimore Herald in 1899. Mencken's world had expanded from the confines of the family cigar factory to the world of Baltimore and beyond. This chapter provides a glimpse of the newspaper business during the early years of the century, when typewriters were hardly used and telephones were regarded as mere toys.

This chapter examines the first two papers of the penny press of the 1830s, the New York Sun and the New York Herald, through their transition from tiny four-sheet bulletins printed out of cramped rookeries to important urban institutions with increasingly immodest architectural ambitions, giving new city inhabitants signposts on the landscape that recalled both a recognizable old world and reassurances of the new. The city and the newspapers shared a common set of values—industrial capitalism, specialization of labor, geographic concentration, and an intricate and specialized economic structure—that materialized in the form that media architecture began to adopt. The parallel development of the city and the newspaper industry shows their forms coming to mirror each other in the segmentation of neighborhoods and news sections.

In this chapter, Ellis describes Cobb’s difficult first year in the big city. Finding a job to support his family and learning how the New York newspapers were run proved to be a daunting task. Cobb’s big breakthrough came as a reporter for the New York Sun covering the Portsmouth Peace Conference. This led to several job offers, including one from Joseph Pulitzer’s Evening World, which Cobb accepted. Over the next six years, Cobb increased his role at this leading newspaper and honed his skills as a writer. Ellis then explores the development of Cobb’s writing as he branched out to produce a variety of columns and stories. Cobb’s success as a reporter led to his rapid rise to fame as he became one of the most popular writers in New York.

This chapter argues that the Soldier novels and The Book of the Long Sun, multi-volume works published subsequent to The Book of the New Sun and The Urth of the New Sun, can be read as metafictional commentaries on The Urth Cycle. It argues that, read in this light, The Urth Cycle overturns the anti-intentionalist position adopted by most contemporary literary critics in favour of a more traditionalist stance, despite appearing to enact the latter. The chapter also examines Pandora by Holly Hollander as an adequate metaphor for interpreting Wolfe's work. A joyous, liberated metafiction, Pandora – the chapter contends – draws attention to Wolfe's preoccupations with the solution of mysteries using the iconography of the lock and the key. In so doing, the novel re-emphasises the model of interpretation that shapes almost all of Wolfe's fiction, that of author as encoder and reader as decoder of elliptically yet elegantly labyrinthine conundrums.

In this 2002 interview, Wolfe discusses the writing of The Book of the Short Sun. He discusses at length his versatility in selecting styles appropriate to the story being told and his formulation of dialogue precisely reflective of the characters speaking. For those readers attempting to unravel or decode the connection between the various Sun books, Gevers’ interview elicits – with some effort – several useful comments from Wolfe that confirm The Book of the New Sun, The Book of the Long Sun, and The Book of the Short Sun together form perhaps the most complex multi-volume work of speculative fiction to emerge within the genre.

Reprinted from Nova Express, Fall/Winter 1988, Person's interview focuses on The Book of the Long Sun, its clergyman hero, its religious dimension, and the contrast in narrative styles between this later work and The Fifth Head of Cerberus. Wolfe discusses Severian's status as a Christian figure, his past and current influences, and clarifies his involvement in the development of the Pringles potato chip manufacturing machine.

The Introduction provides a brief overview of Gene Wolfe's life and work and contextualizes the subsequent interviews and articles in terms of his life and publishing career. It explores how each of Wolfe's reflections and commentaries is invaluable for a better understanding of various aspects of the author and his work.

Reprinted from Science Fiction Studies, 1988, Wolfe's interview with Larry McCaffery is the most wide-ranging of the collection. It extends beyond the usual questions of autobiography, inspiration and literary practice to include discussions of the nature of language and consciousness, Wolfe's fascination with memory, and a much more profound reflection on The Book of the New Sun and its interconnectedness with the novels and stories that preceded it. Wolfe's intellectual energy is palpable in every response.

Reprinted from Plan[e]t Engineering (1984), this essay takes the conception of the seemingly paradoxical library of Nessus in The Shadow of the Torturer as the start of a discussion that ranges across the work of Kafka and Borges, the etymology of bibliotheca, and the oppressive knowledge that there are more books published than it is possible to read. Examining the four books carried by Severian, the protagonist of The Book of the New Sun, to the imprisoned Thecla, Wolfe considers each text's content and its associations with both its fictional and contemporary political and cultural contexts.

This is a rather discursive interview that nevertheless reveals a new found political relevance in several of Wolfe's early stories, notably ‘Seven American Nights’ and ‘Hour of Trust’. Wolfe discusses his use of ambiguity, the influence on his fiction of his experiences in the Korean War, and the connections between his multi-volume series. The interview concludes with a discussion of Wolfe's two-volume The Wizard Knight and the possibility that it may form a ‘Rosetta Stone’ for deciphering themes treated more elliptically in the ‘Sun’ sequences and the Latro novels, Soldier of the Mist and Soldier of Arete.

In this interview with a playful Wolfe reprinted from Thrust: Science Fiction in Review, Winter-Spring 1983, Frazier reviews the author's early career. Wolfe lists and evaluates his short fiction and the emergence of what would later become part of The Wolfe Archipelago: ‘The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories’, ‘The Death of Doctor Island’ and ‘The Doctor of Death Island’. He acknowledges his debt to Damon Knight and other editors. The majority of the interview is composed of a discussion of the recently completed The Book of the New Sun. Wolfe identifies it generically as science fantasy, explains his choice of a torturer as a protagonist, and acknowledges the trans-temporal plotting of the narrative.

Swanson's interview, reprinted from Interzone, Autumn 1986, explores Wolfe's attitudes to technology, his combat experiences in Korea, the generic labelling of his work, and the reoccurrence of libraries and librarians throughout his fiction. Wolfe discusses Free Live Free, his most recent publication, the creation of The Book of the New Sun, and the possibility of his work being filmed.

In this interview, Wolfe reflects on his then thirty-year writing career. He discusses at length the sources for several of his short stories and for There Are Doors, which segues into a detailed discussion of self-deception and the deception of others as a recurring theme in his fiction. This is a personal reflection in many ways, with Wolfe tracing his preoccupation with memory, the subjectivity of perception, and the manipulation of the individual to aspects of his personal life. It is also notable for Wolfe's perspectives on ‘cultivated’ readers, readers’ reactions to his work and his consideration of what makes a good writer and a good (and a bad) academic.

Jordan's fitful interview with Wolfe ranges across Wolfe's religious and political beliefs, science, the practice of being a novelist, The Book of the New Sun, The Urth of the New Sun, and Wolfe's use of the symbol and notion of the wolf. It is at its most revealing when Jordan discusses the religious dimensions of Wolfe's work – particularly with regard to The Book of the New Sun and There Are Doors – Wolfe's perspective on female and male subjectivity, and his treatment of the pagan world in Soldier of the Mist and Soldier of Arete.

Reprinted from Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, 1984, Colin Greenland's interview is the first to interrogate the posthistoric setting of Urth in The Book of the New Sun. In response to Greenland's questioning, Wolfe provides a valuable insight into the conception and execution of one of the most vital storyworlds in speculative fiction. Their discussion ranges across economics, technology, and pseudomonasticism, In its later stages, the interview addresses the characteristics of American publishing, contemporary environmental and space technology, and sustainability.