Dan Wakefield, who is currently Writer in Residence at Florida International University in Miami, is a novelist, journalist, and screenwriter, whose best-selling novels Going All The Way, and Starting Over were produced into feature films.

Wakefield is also the author of the non-fiction book New York in the 50s, a memoir on which a documentary film has been produced. Wakefield also created the NBC prime time TV series, “James at 15.”

Wakefield’s first published book was Island in the City: The World of Spanish Harlem, followed by the non-fiction books, The Addict: An Anthology, All Her Children: The Making of a Soap Opera, and Supernation at Peace and War, which first appeared as the entire issue of the March, 1968 Atlantic Monthly.

A recipient of a Neiman Fellowship in Journalism, Wakefield has also been awarded the Bernard DeVoto Fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, a Rockefeller Grant for Creative Writing, and an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

His non-fiction books on spirituality include Returning: A Spiritual Journey, Creating from the Spirit, The Story of Your Life: Writing a Spiritual Autobiography, Expect a Miracle, How Do You Know When It’s God?: A Spiritual Memoir, and Spiritually Incorrect: Finding God in All the Wrong Places.

A graduate of Columbia College in 1955, Wakefield has been a staff writer for The Nation magazine, a Contributing Editor of the Atlantic Monthly, a Contributing Writer for GQ, and on the advisory board of Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion.

He has taught in the writing programs at Boston University, the University of Massachusetts Boston, Emerson College, and The Iowa Writers Workshop. His website is www.danwakefield.com

Derek Alger: Whether you realize it or not, you’re part of living history. Your book New York in the 50s is a wonderful chronicle of that period.

Dan Wakefield: The book began when I wrote a memoir of James Baldwin for GQ. It was the idea of Art Cooper the editor, who suggested I do something about literary mentors. I’d been wanting to write about Baldwin since his death a few years before, and probably never would have if Art hadn’t given me an assignment -- a deadline! When the piece was published, I got a letter from Sam Lawrence, who had published my novels. He said the Baldwin piece was the best thing I’d written, and why not do a book on NY in the 50s? I thought -- what a great idea. How come I never thought of it? So it was really two other people -- an editor and a publisher-- who gave me the idea and the backing to write the book.

DA: New York seemed more like a small town community back in the 50s, at least among writers? Do you see major changes in the world of publishing today?

DW: Publishing today is wildly different. It’s the same in the sense of inefficiency and, as Jason Epstein says in “The Book Business”, it’s still operated like a 17th century business. The difference is now they publish fewer books, there are fewer publishers, and they are all looking for the Home Run book. No trying to “nurture” or “develop” writers. Final decisions are made by marketing people. An editor I knew took early retirement, explaining “It’s not an editor’s game anymore.”

DA: Do you think writers today approach their craft differently?

DW: The attitude of writers is different. In the ‘50s, you were embarrassed to say you’d got a big advance (though few did anyway), or made a lot of money. You feared “Selling Out.” Now that’s the point! Status is measured by size of advance. It sounds like sex: “I’ve got a bigger one than you do!”

DA: You certainly were surrounded by a talented group of writers when you were in your twenties. We all know the big names, such as Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, and Jack Kerouac, but who do you think were some of the greatest writers neglected over the course of time?

DW: In any time, many fine writers of the fifties era were overlooked or forgotten. There was a time when Saul Bellow, Herbert Gold, and Harvey Swados were all considered up and coming writers of the same rank! -- then Bellow pulled ahead in the horse race, as the Bright Jewish writer of the time (It was a time in which Jewish writers were first being recognized in the formerly WASP-run literary party.) Herbert Gold still publishes good work. Harvey Swados died at age 50, but some of his books are coming back into print.

My Columbia classmates Sam Astrachan and Ivan Gold were and are fine writers. Sam has lived in France for thirty years, now publishes in French, can’t get published here any more. Ivan had some books come back into print a few years ago. Sam’s “An End to Dying” and Ivan’s “Nickel Miseries” are classics.

DA: Many people learn the hard way that writers write in spite of their drinking, not because of it. What are your thoughts on not drinking wisely but oh too well.

DW: In the 50s we were told that to be a good writer you had to be a good drinker. It did a lot of people in. We thought Dylan Thomas dying at 39 was glamorous and romantic. Hemingway promoted a lot of this b.s. You can drink and write in your twenties, but then it starts to take its toll. Fitzgerald didn’t live to finish what Edmund Wilson thought was his “most mature” novel “The Last Tycoon”, and he wrote it after he finally sobered up, with the help of Sheila Graham.

DA: The hard drinking writer is a pretty enduring myth.

DW: You still only hear the glamour part of drinking and mythology (lies). Like Eugene O’Neill was a drunk, wrote all those great plays. In fact, he stopped drinking at 38 and except for a few relapses kept sober -- “Mourning Becomes Electra,” “The Iceman Cometh,” etc. I could go on about this forever. I wrote about the alcohol mythology in my book Releasing the Creative Spirit. Ivan Gold wrote a terrific novel about the writing/drinking stuff called “Sam’s in a Dry Season.”

DA: What about your own experience?