USA News & World Reports interview with Elmore Leonard

Several years ago, I volunteered with a Detroit area arts organization which was to present an important award to Elmore Leonard. The execs scheduled a meeting with him for lunch to confirm the details, then suddenly realized that none of them had actually read any of his books. They asked me to join them just to have someone at the table who spoke the language.

Turns out we mostly talked about the movies that had been made from his books. In an interview in the 11/5/07 USA Today, Leonard said, “I wanted my books to become movies. That was my aim. I wanted to make some money doing this. My first books, I would get like 2,000 bucks. That was mostly in the ’50s, then it went up to $4,000. I didn’t really make money from books until the 1980s. But I got a lot more from movies.”

In that arts organization meeting, others asked Leonard what authors he read, and his pick at the time was Cormac McCarthy. In the USA Today piece, he mentions Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe and Thomas Lynch, the funeral director-author-essayist-poet from Milford, Mich.

We offer 37 Leonard books online — find them here

 

Tags: Authors, Books, dutch leonard, elmore leonard, first editions, movies