A Conversation with The Greatest Living American Writer

Neal Pollack is the author of 11 bestselling books, a Jeopardy! champion, and is widely regarded as “The Greatest Living American Writer.” I chatted with him about this and more.

You’ve said you realized you wanted to be a writer in seventh grade. Tell us how that realization came about.

We had these weekly vocabulary lists and we had to write a paragraph using them. For some reason, this inspired me, and I started creating these ridiculous serialized sagas that were part Monty Python, part who knows what. There were “words with Latin roots” so I created this soap opera about Julius Caesar and Cleopatra vaguely modeled on TV miniseries that I was watching. Then I had Caesar transported to World War II era, and then there was something to do with outer space that was vaguely Star Wars-y. It was nerdy as hell, and didn’t win me any friends, but I had fun with it, and I was good at it and I realized I was never going to do anything else with my life. 

You graduated from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and spent much of your career working for newspapers. How has journalism changed in your lifetime and what do you make of the sad decline of print news, mainly newspapers?

When I started in journalism school, we did our assignments on electric typewriters. Just to give you a sense of how long ago that was. Northwestern had its juniors intern at newspapers and magazines all over the country, and there were an infinite number of choices. My friend runs the same program at NU now, and there are very few choices and very few students actually want to work for newspapers. 

I think the decline of newspapers has mostly damaged news on the local front. You need beat reporters and columnists to hold local officials and businesses accountable for corruption and the various petty cruelties of municipal power. I’m not as bearish about journalism on a national level. I feel like the national press has become extremely sclerotic and subservient to power in the last ten years, not to mention excessively partisan. It’s all moved online, which means that the press now is kind of like the partisan press that existed at the founding of the Republic. There are various filters you need to parse to come to some version of the truth. 

But I feel like the media has actually grown up in the last year or so. If you look at the coverage of the LA fires, it’s been mostly excellent, a nice mix of investigative reporting and on-the-scene description. The media’s sympathies are in the right place. It is not totally hopeless for journalism. 

You grew up in Arizona but got to Texas as fast as you could. Which state has better Mexican food and why? Also, do they even have BBQ in Arizona?

            I wouldn’t say I got here as fast as I could. I lived in Chicago for 12 years and also lived in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. The food is better in Texas across the board. There are more people, more Mexicans, more variety. And I would not eat BBQ anywhere else in the world other than maybe North Carolina. 

And while on food…Jewish brisket or Texas brisket?

The Jewish brisket I grew up eating was flavorless and fatty and mostly steamed. I do like deli corned beef and pastrami. But Texas brisket is far, far superior. 

Early on in your fiction career you began billing yourself as “The Greatest Living American Writer.” Many saw this as a spoof of larger-than-life authors Ernest Hemingway and Norman Mailer who were more or less being characters themselves. How did this come about, what are some of the pitfalls of billing yourself as someone you’re not, and what does your now adult son Elijah think of the character?

I started writing these pieces as a way to make fun of pompous literary journalists, and it just gradually evolved into something larger than life. It had a lot to do with the fact that McSweeneys picked it up in the late 90s, when it was the absolute hippest thing in the literary world. When it went online, there wasn’t a ton of competition, so The Greatest Living American Writer had a lot of bandwidth. Unfortunately, at times the persona took over my actual life, and then there was the fact that a lot of people didn’t believe I actually existed because Dave Eggers, who founded and edited McSweeneys, was such a big presence himself. So people thought that I was a creation of him. At one point I had a journalist call my mother to confirm that I actually existed. After a while, I got sick of the persona, people got sick of the persona, and then the press kind of turned on the persona. It was a real mess. But years later, after the hubub died down, I was able to write some satirical pieces in the persona’s voice and it was fine. 

Elijah doesn’t care about the persona. I don’t know if he really knows about it. He has his own life. 

Speaking of characters…I’m an outdoor writer and as such drink, smoke cigars, devour meat, and couldn’t touch my toes unless I was leaning over to grab a beer. Explain yoga to me and what it’s meant to your life.

You can do yoga without touching your toes. It has nothing to do with flexibility. It’s a practice designed to calm the mind, and the physical part of it is important because people are often distracted from a calm mind by stiffness, pain, and discomfort. Yoga hasn’t kept me from dealing with addiction issues. It hasn’t kept me from dealing with grief and personal disappointment. But it’s something I can always turn to to relax me and help me pop my stiff joints back into place. You can smoke cigars and drink meat and still have a regular yoga practice. 

You once wrote, “the Internet can be a really cruel place. People say and do all kinds of mean stuff because they know that most of it doesn’t have real-world consequences.” How do you balance this truth with having to promote yourself and your work on Social Media?

Well, I don’t have a personal Twitter account. Most of my social media is Instagram photos of my pets and my game-show appearances, and then a regular Facebook presence. I find myself getting into political arguments on Facebook all the time, and people were especially vicious during COVID, but as my fame has waned, so has the day-to-day cruelty. 

What is the Book and Film Globe?

It is an independent website that covers the worlds of books and film and streaming TV. We publish reviews, interviews, and cultural commentary, as well as some original reporting. I have been the editor-in-chief for more than seven years, and I’ll do it for the rest of my career if they let me. 

You’ve successfully appeared on Jeopardy! and Pop Culture Jeopardy! Give us an amusing anecdote about each. 

When I was on the original Jeopardy, my neck seized up and my fingers went numb and I made a contestant coordinator give me a massage. When I was on Pop Culture Jeopardy last year, my glasses kept fogging up. I am very high maintenance. 

Let’s pretend I’ve never read any of your work. What two books of yours should I read and why?

Everyone seems to love my novel Jewball, about Jewish basketball players fighting Nazis in the 1930s. In this era of heightened antisemitism, I would love for that to continue to get play. I love all my books, but you should dip into my first book, The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, and then if you like it, keep on cruising. 

What are you working on for your next book?

I have a few different concepts that I’m kicking around, but the one that seems to have the most market potential is called My Life In Letters, a memoir of my insane literary adventures. My career hasn’t always been lucrative, but it has been interesting, and maybe my stories will inspire someone to do or not do something. Or at least keep people amused. 

Visit Book and Film Globe at bookandfilmglobe.com

Email Neal Pollack at neal@bookandfilmglobe.com.

 This piece first appeared in the Fredericksburg Standard.

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