Malcolm Edwards’ interview with Wolfe first appeared in Vector, May– June 1973, following the publication of The Fifth Head of Cerberus: Three Novellas(1972). Although Wolfe had only published his first short story, ‘The Dead Man’, in 1965, his work had already attracted critical acclaim. ‘The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories’ (1970) and ‘Against the Lafayette Escadrille’ (1972) had both earned Nebula Award nominations (in 1971 and 1973 respectively); and ‘The Fifth Head of Cerberus’, the opening novella of the collection, had been shortlisted for both the Hugo and Nebula Awards in 1973. Here Wolfe discusses his life and early career.

ME: Could you first of all tell us something about your background, how you came into writing, and why sf?

GW: I was born in Brooklyn, New York. This came home to me, to me who had always called myself a Texan and thought of myself as a Texan, when I read that Thomas Wolfe ‘warmed up’ for writing by walking the night streets of Brooklyn. He was from the hill country of northwest North Carolina and so was my great, great grandfather – making us, at least presumptively, distant cousins. Hemingway sharpened twenty pencils and Willa Cather read a passage from her Bible, but Thomas Wolfe, bless him, swung his big body down Brooklyn streets and may have been thrashing out some weighty problem in Of Time and the Riverduring the early hours of Thursday 7 May, 1931. I hope so. I like to think of him out there on the sidewalk worrying about Gene Gant and flaying NYU.

At any rate I was born in that city at the southwestern tip of Long Island. My parents lived in New Jersey at the time, but they moved and moved. To Peoria, where I played with Rosemary Dietsch who lived next door, and her brothers Robert and Richard. To Massachusetts, where little Ruth McCann caught her hand in our car door. To Logan, Ohio, my father's home, where Boyd Wright and I got stung by bumble bees that had nested in our woodshed. To Des Moines, where a redheaded boy taught me chess while we were both in the second grade. Then to Dallas for a year, and at last to Houston, which became my home town, the place I was ‘from’.