[In the following interview, Millhauser provides some insight on his perspectives regarding the creative process.]

Saratoga Springs, in upstate New York, is perhaps best known as the home of the oldest racetrack in America, where Texans in the obligatory ten-gallon hats and the more genteel traditional horsey set gather each August for the Travers Stakes. But Steven Millhauser's imagination is captured more by structures like the old Batchelor mansion, an elaborately painted and turreted Victorian folly a few blocks off the main drag. "The man who built that was not thinking just of a practical dwelling," Millhauser tells PW on a brilliant early spring day. "He was a dreamer."

In seven novels and short-story collections, Millhauser has made a considerable reputation writing about the inner lives of novelists, painters, puppeteers and other assorted inventors. His latest novel, Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, out last month from Crown, depicts a turn-of-the-century entrepreneur caught up in "a long dream of stone," building an increasingly fantastical series of hotels in a precisely evoked, but oddly ethereal, New York City. His ambitions culminate in the Grand Cosmo, a monstrously rococo pleasure dome that combines elements of the hotel, the department store, the carnival and the museum in its endlessly mutating interiors. This shadow city, "in comparison with which the actual city was not simply inferior, but superfluous," is the dreamer's greatest success, and the businessman's undoing.

But when attention turns to himself and his own creative impulses, Millhauser insists writers are the most boring people imaginable. "I'm assuming everything I say is of no interest whatsoever, and that's what allows me to say it," he warns. "If I thought it was of interest, I'd immediately be silent."

Tall and thin, with graying hair and a gently exacting professorial manner, Millhauser, 52, is disarmingly voluble even when threatening to revert to the public silence he has kept for most of his career. With few exceptions, he has scrupulously avoided interviews—"that means I'm now unscrupulous," he deadpans—and the biographical sheet on file in his publicist's office is revealingly blank. "You know, I was convinced you were going to describe my shirt. So I chose the least noticeable, the blandest one possible," he says of his (heretofore unnoticed) blue and purple plaid flannel.

Millhauser's playful mockery of his own public non-persona belies the persistent melancholy of his artist tales. His first novel, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943–1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright, published in 1972 (and reissued this month by Vintage), was a dark elegy for the creative genius of childhood, a portrait of the artist as a 12-year-old boy written by an overly literal, secretly envious best friend. The stories gathered in collections with names capturing Millhauser's fascination with the fantastic and the outmoded—The Barnum Museum, In the Penny Arcade, Little Kingdoms—often returned to the theme of the solitary inventor or artist, stranded both ahead of and behind his own time, gradually fading out of the real world and into the imaginary.

Now, after 25 years of making dreamers his business, Millhauser has made the dreamer a businessman. "I wanted to write about something as different from my earlier stories about artists as possible," he tells PW in a coffee shop across from the Adelphi, the only hotel remaining from Saratoga's heyday as a summer playground for the likes of J. P. Morgan, Diamond Jim Brady and Lillian Russell. (Millhauser has lived in this historic town with his wife and two young children since the late 1980s). "And the thing most different from an artist is a businessman, someone who looks at the world practically. Now I have a feeling that as I did this I was secretly turning him into an artist, trying to find the place where his imagination touched mine, because I wanted it to be a sympathetic view. I've always liked the myth of the self-made man in America."

The novel grew out of research Millhauser did for a story called "Paradise Park," a long fantasy on turn-of-the-century Coney Island published in Grand Street in 1993. Millhauser had found a historical moment in which time itself seemed out of joint. "The grand hotels, the great department stores," Millhauser says, "always combined the most modern mechanisms—elevators, vacuum-cleaning systems—with deliberate imitations of old-fashioned European features. It's a wonderful contradiction—lookingback over your shoulder at something that is passing and also at everything that is aggressively modern in America."

Since the market forces that spectacularly reward and punish such dreamers in stone as Martin Dressler are generally oblivious to novelists of a serious bent, Millhauser has, since the late 1980s, taken four months out of each writing year to teach at Skidmore College. For him, teaching writing is an odd, paradoxical business, but he throws himself into it. "Writing can't be taught," he insists, "and if you know that you'll suffer much less confusion. But what can be taught is a certain kind of attentive, skillful reading. If you want to write, you absorb literature. And then you can't stop writing."

Millhauser recalls wanting to write stories ever since he could read them. "When I was seven years old," he in-tones, pausing with a mock portentousness worthy of Edwin Mullhouse's preadolescent biographer. "But seriously, I guess I always thought from childhood that I wanted to write. But then many children think that."

After finishing college at Columbia, Millhauser took part-time jobs, shuttled back and forth between New York City and his parent's house in Stratford, Conn., and completed numerous stories and a novel. An agent circulated the novel, and while Knopf rejected it, an editor did express interest in seeing his next book. In the meantime, Millhauser enrolled in the English Ph.D. program at Brown, working, over two summers, on the book that became Edwin Mullhouse. It was accepted "instantly," he says, by Knopf's Robert Gottlieb in 1971 and published to rave reviews in 1972.

Edwin Mullhouse is a not-so-gentle satire on the savage art of literary biography, which—quite literally, in the novel—murders genius in its very attempt to anatomize it. Jeffrey Cartwright, playing Boswell to the 12-year-old author of a hallucinatory masterpiece called Cartoons, documents everything from Edwin's earliest burblings to his schoolyard crushes on his most disturbed classmates. It's a dizzying, uncannily vivid elaboration of what Holden Caulfield memorably dismissed as "all that David Copperfield kind of crap," transplanted to suburban Connecticut of the 1940s. But in the end, our brief glimpse of Cartoons suggests that Jeffrey's biography—and the real world itself—is merely a "scrupulous distortion, a specious clarity and hardness imposed on mists and shadows."

While the novel is a wicked indictment of biography's excesses, Millhauser says, its mists and shadows are drawn straight from his own past. The book, he says, "has a deliberately implausible premise, which was what released me into being able to write about my childhood at all. I did Zola-like research, interviewing my third-grade teacher to find out exactly what happened. But within that, I invented wildly. The book imitates a certain kind of realistic novel, and pushes more and more toward the extravagant."

Millhauser followed up his debut with Portrait of a Romantic in 1977 and In the Penny Arcade in 1984, both from Knopf. When Knopf rejected an early version of From the Realm of Morpheus, his agent, Amanda Urban, took the book to Morrow, which published it in 1986. But Millhauser, desiring a smaller house that could give him more attention, subsequently went to Ann Patty's S&S imprint, Poseidon Press, which brought out The Barnum Museum in 1990. After Poseidon folded in 1993, just as Little Kingdoms was being published, Millhauser followed Patty to Crown. "So I've had a checkered past," he laughs.

Asked about connections between his first and latest novels, Millhauser admits there are "patterns I helplessly follow. I'm attracted to extreme things, and I see extreme things in a deeply practical culture doomed to failure. There's a place where things go too far, become too much of themselves. I seek out that place always. But on a technical level, with Martin Dressler's last hotel, I wanted to stretch the real into the fantastic without actually snapping it."

On the whole, Millhauser is reluctant to discuss openly the tasks he sets for himself as an artist, hewing to a highly articulate, grown-up version of "the maddening evasiveness" that bedeviled Edwin Mullhouse's fictional biographer. It's as if he doesn't want to let readers into the innermost chamber, to reveal just how the man behind the curtain is controlling the men behind their own curtains in his stories. "There's something so intimate about my imagination that I don't want to tamper with it."

Asked about the nature of fiction in a rare 1982 interview with Contemporary Authors, Millhauser made a typically firm, and typically evasive, declaration: "Unless a writer is a trained aesthetician, his opinion concerning the nature of fiction is of no more interest than his opinion concerning the nature of the economy." In other words, as one skeptical academic supposedly said of efforts to bring Nabokov to Harvard in the 1950s: "Why would you hire an elephant to teach zoology?"

While reluctant to identify himself with "the person representing Stephen Millhauser in that interview," the author backs up his old disclaimer. "Most writers are not terribly interesting when it comes to describing the nature of what they do. What you learn from a writer, as a rule, is what his passions are. If I wanted to learn how to think about art theoretically, I would not go to a writer. I would go to a philosopher. And then I would find the philosopher dry and dull and I would finally go back to the works of the writer."

But even as Millhauser asserts that artists as people are not interesting, that they have little of value to say about their own work, he finds their creative drive endlessly fruitful as a subject for his own art. "Artists are not terribly interesting if you observe them from the outside. But they're interesting insofar as they represent a refusal to behave the way conventional people behave. What artists do, if they're the real thing, is shut themselves off secretly in a room and ask not to be disturbed while they pursue waking dreams. This is a very curious way of behaving over a lifetime. It's very close to lunacy, in fact."

Does Millhauser really believe himself to be a lunatic? "Yes and no," he says. "It's as if my fear with each new book is that 'Oh, now I've really stepped over the edge. Now they'll know the truth about me, that I'm a screaming madman who spends all day having pictures in my mind and writing them down.' The only comfort a review has ever given me is that feeling that 'Ah, I'm allowed to do this. I can do this again.'"

But in characteristic style, Millhauser can't resist going on, pulling the rug out from under himself, wriggling out of one statement about his art with another, equally adamant declaration.

"As I say this, something else rises in me, which is the opposite of that—to assert the absolute validity of what I do. I have no doubts about it; I never have. Dreaming is the healthiest possible thing to do. It sounds arrogant, but when I make up these tales, I'm not removing myself from reality. I'm pointing myself absolutely toward the center."

He pauses. "Of course, I'm also aware that this may be a terrible delusion. I'm involved in a very peculiar human activity. But I'll never stop."