Charles Dickens is considered one of the last great 18th Century novelists, one of the first great symbolic novelists, and one of the greatest all-around novelists of all time. Peter Ackroyd, author of Dickens: Public Life & Private Passion and Dickens' London, delves into this man's life and career the only way he knew how - he read all of Dickens' works three times and read everything ever written about him. In order to better understand him, Ackroyd tried to get close to Dickens' inspirations, which facilitated his interpretations.

Based on his research, Ackroyd concluded that many of the events that occur in some of Dickens' most famous novels like Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, and A Christmas Carol, may have been based on actual events. Ackroyd's says in this 1991 interview with Don Swaim that the strangeness in these unforgettable characters was simple reality for Dickens. To hear more about the life and career of one of the world's greatest authors, click on the link below.

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For over a decade, many of the best writers of the English language found their way onto Don Swaim's daily two-minute CBS Radio show, Book Beat. His New York-based program was derived from longer interviews, sometimes 40-minutes in length. Found exclusively here, Wired for Books proudly webcasts these conversations in their entirety using RealAudio.