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Don Swaim Interviews

Audio Interview with Jean Auel

Best selling author of The Clan of the Cave Bear, The Valley of Horses, The Mammoth Hunters and The Plains of Passage, Jean Auel talks with Don Swaim about becoming a novelist in her forties in this 1985 interview. Jean Auel tells Don about having over a million copies of her latest novel in print.

Jean Auel says her first novel evolved from an idea for a short story. With her children almost gone, she thought it was time to write a story about a prehistoric woman. She decided to research the idea and came home from the library with fifty books. Jean Auel says she then became totally obsessed with the story she was writing.

She wrote four or five drafts of a story she originally called Earth's Children and eventually realized she had six books, not just one. Jean Auel talks about learning the business of writing and how she got an agent and published her first book, The Clan of the Cave Bear.

Listen in RealAudio to the Jean Auel interview with Don Swaim, December 2, 1985
(26 min. 15 sec.)

Jean Auel, 1985
mp3 file