Conversations with Jerome Charyn : University Press of Mississippi : 9781628460896 : 162846089X : 30 Sep 2014 : This volume of fourteen interviews covers the prolific and rich career of author Jerome Charyn (b. 1937). Four of the interviews appear in English for the first time, and two interviews appear here in print for the first time as well.As one of his autobiographical volumes claims, Jerome Charyn is a "Bronx Boy," a child born from immigrant parents who went through Ellis Island in the 1920s like so many other travelers without luggage, a "little werewolf" who grew up on his own in the chaos of the Bronx ghetto. "I think I was defined by two things: World War Two and the movies." His work remains deeply marked by this childhood largely forgotten by the American Dream. If Charyn has spent much of his life in Paris, he has paradoxically never left the Bronx: "'El Bronx' is there inside my head, and I revisit it the way Hemingway would fish the Big Two-Hearted River in his dreams."