Richard Russo (1949– ) lives in coastal Maine. He has written five novels: Mohawk, The Risk Pool, Nobody’s Fool, Straight Man, and Empire Falls, the Pulitzer Prize-winner that he adapted for a television miniseries. His collection of short stories is entitled The Whore’s Child.

I remember when my first story was accepted...

Richard Russo, in an interview by Robert Birnbaum: Back in graduate school, all of us—all of my friends—we were all trying to get published, all trying to get that first story published. My first story was published in a magazine with a circulation of about 300 and I was paid in contributor’s copies. Six or seven of them, not as many copies as I had family members to give them to, but I couldn’t afford more than that and that was payment. I can remember bouncing off the walls when that happened. Because it was the first real validation that I had somebody else saying, “You’re a writer.” Somebody else giving me permission to go on and write another story. I fed off that publication for a couple of years. I had a couple of other really small successes, but that first one was astonishing. After twenty some rejections of Mohawk—and Gary Fisketjohn at Vintage said yes to Mohawk—I had a similar reaction because that was the first story and this was the first book. The idea that I would very shortly be able to walk into a bookstore, presumably in a town other than the town that I lived in, and be able to find a copy of my book, which I learned was not true [laughs] but I thought it was--it was just astonishing. It was just the most incredible thing. I lived for a long time in a waking dream, waiting for that book to come out. So when someone says, “God, the Pulitzer, that must have been the greatest thing?,” it was pretty wonderful, but in its own way, no more wonderful than that first story with a circulation of 300.

Robert Birnbaum is Editor-at-Large of the literary and cultural website IdentityTheory.com, where he has published hundreds of interviews.