Before Oriana Fallaci became synonymous with the political interview, she was already treating the interview as a battleground.

The Egotists gathers sixteen encounters with figures including Norman Mailer, Sean Connery, Ingrid Bergman, H. Rap Brown, Hugh Hefner, Jeanne Moreau, Federico Fellini, Alfred Hitchcock, Sammy Davis Jr. and Mary Hemingway. The American edition was adapted and expanded from Fallaci’s Italian Gli antipatici, with several interviews selected specifically for its US context. 

Her questions frequently provoke rather than clarify, and the appeal now is partly historical—these are major twentieth-century cultural figures caught speaking at length before celebrity interviewing became an almost entirely managed form. Sean Connery talks about Bond as a fantasy of survival; Norman Mailer is pushed on America and anti-Americanism; elsewhere artists and public figures are permitted enough rope to become revealing, ridiculous, occasionally both. It is a genuinely excellent period object: journalism as intellectual blood sport.

Henry Regnery Company, Chicago, 1968. First American edition. Hardcover with original dust jacket. Light shelf wear and rubbing to jacket, with some creasing and minor edge wear; boards and binding sound. Internally clean and well preserved. Very good condition.