Words Still Count with Me features interviews with dozens of twentieth-century authors who represent the best in their fields of fact and fiction and whose work is destined to survive. Among them are E. B.

White in Maine and Saul Bellow in Chicago, Samuel Beckett in Paris, Dame Rebecca West and Sir Stephen Spender in London, Vladimir Nabokov in Montreux, Leonardo Sciascia in Sicily and Ignazio Silone in Rome, Amos Oz in Jerusalem, Haruki Murakami in Tokyo, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Ralph Ellison in Manhattan. Some are Nobel laureates in literature, some are the author's longtime journalistic colleagues, including Theodore H. White and John Hersey.

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Whenever possible, Mitgang interviewed these international writers in their own backyards, alone; he is one of the few journalists who had the good fortune to do so. The interviews are not simply biographical entries but impressionistic portraits designed to reveal the creative lives of the authors, mostly in their own words.

In one section of his Introduction, on interviewing techniques, Mitgang offers the reader an inside view of some of the tricks of the trade, including his surprising conclusion that in the encounter between interviewer and subject, honesty may be the greatest trick of all.