I think all artists, even the great ones, are combinations of arrogance and innocence. As life goes on we may lose one or the other in some proportio… - Hortense Calisher

out in what I knew damn well was the real world—of literature and everything else—my agony was how to begin. (How do you?) You begin. (What had held you back?) Fear.

I think of myself as a person—after that as a woman. If one doesn’t, one narrows oneself. And the world...I think it’s ultimately foolish of us to resegregate ourselves. The strengths of sisterhood are possible without that. And the work itself can be as much from the dower of what we are as women as we want it to be.

(You graduated when you were seventeen, and shortly left the household to work and live on your own. Yet you weren’t to publish for twenty years. How come? Still fear?) HC: Not really. Circumstance. First off, I came out into the great world. Of the Depression, then. I’d already worked in department stores. That’s a very instructive milieu—of what I call “business dreams” and artificiality all mixed. But then I was plunged into the starvation world. The word poverty doesn’t say it hard enough. As a welfare visitor—investigator, they called us—I saw homes, heard tales that still make me shiver. The whole seamy side of the happy U.S. It changed my life. As it would one day haunt what I wrote.