The Best of NPR's Fresh Air Interviews

Writer David Foster Wallace was on Fresh Air in 1997 to talk about his collection of essays A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.

Scientist Carl Sagan describes what a nuclear winter would be like in this short interview from 1991. He hypothesized what this would be like in his 1990 book A Path Where No Man Thought: Nuclear Winter and the End of the Arms Race.

Andrew Solomon won the 2001 National Book Award for his book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. In this Fresh Air interview from 2001, Terry Gross talks with him about the book and the mental illness of depression.

This interview caught Steve Jobs at an interesting point in his career in 1996, one year before he would return as CEO of Apple. After co-founding Apple with Steve Wozniak in the 1970s, he was pushed out of Apple in 1985.

Novelist William Styron talks about his 1990 book Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness in this interview with Fresh Air. Styron recounts his battle with clinical depression in 1985 that led him to near suicide before he checked himself into a hospital and eventually improved.

In this hour-long interview with Terry Gross from 1986, novelist Kurt Vonnegut discusses the experiences throughout his life that informed many of the novels he's written.

Louis L'Amour is known as the "most famous obscure novelist." He has written 79 novels, mostly westerns. His novels have also been adapted into films such as "Hondo." L'Amour's latest novel is "Comstock Lode."

Actor and comedian Paul Reubens gave this interview to Fresh Air back in 2004 when his show Pee-Wee's Playhouse was released on DVD. Terry Gross asks him many questions about the formation of his character Pee-Wee Herman, and Reubens tells humorous anecdotes of how the beloved character came to be.

The writer says that his desire to perform his weekly radio show stems from his restlessness after hours spent at his typewriter. He talks about how he developed a regional brand of comedy and his experiences working in public radio.

Lionel Dahmer is the father of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, who committed some of the most ghastly crimes imaginable. Lionel has written a new memoir about his life with his son, "A Father's Story." (William Morrow), in which he tries to understand what happened to his son, and how he could turn into such a monster.