"The many interviews and recollections which James Gibson has gathered together in this book will add greatly to our understanding of Hardy the person and Hardy the writer. The result of several years of research, it makes available not only the well-known interviews described by famous writers like Virginia Woolf and Siegfried Sasson but those of more than one hundred other people who wrote down their accounts of meetings with him. It is a useful work of reference and fascinating both in what it tells us about Hardy and what we learn in some cases about the interviewer. "--BOOK JACKET.