Harry Mark Petrakis is nearing his seventies, and like his characters, he has endured indignities and triumphs. As a child he suffered a two-year bout with tuberculosis. He read avidly to pass the time and subsequently developed a myopic condition that expanded his imaginative vision beyond the immediate confines of his Greek-American culture. In the early 1980s, he suffered from neurological problems and survived the harrowing suicidal depression that followed. Born in 1923 in St. Louis, Missouri, Petrakis is the son of a Greek Orthodox priest who emigrated from the island of Crete to the United States in 1916. The parochial influence of Christian and Moslem traditions permeates Petrakis's ancestry and personal history, providing both the might and the demise of his characters. Petrakis shuns casual usage of the term ethnic writer, saying that it is often used in a pejorative sense. He has deemed the dual liberations and restrictions of ethnicity as mutiny-inspiring. Petrakis's community did not breed a culture of readers. He was raised in poverty in the Cottage Grove area on the South Side of Chicago. The South Side is the setting for his characters who are working-class immigrantsrestaurateurs, steel workers and grocery clerks. Initially, his work was supported by Jewish and other educated immigrant groups. Petrakis dropped out of high school and indulged in obsessive gambling for almost three years before he realized the inevitable self-destruction of this lifestyle. He worked at a myriad of occupations-all the while writing and rewriting and persevering through ten years of pre-printed rejection slips before his short story, Pericles on 34th St., was published in The Atlantic. His collection of novels, anthologies of short stories and memoirs is cultivated with influences of writers such as Nikos Kazantzakis, George Seferiades and Odysseus Elytis. A Dream of Kings, published in 1966, won the National Book Award and was adapted for film starring Anthony Quinn. His latest novel, Ghost of the Sun, published in 1990, is the sequel to Dream. The young and fiery first-generation Greek has mellowed to a grandfatherly, mustached persona. Yet his power as a storyteller prevails over the declination of age. As he reads he gestures with his hands and pauses at moments, savoring the drama of his performance. His stubborn passion for writing, despite poverty, is now rewarded with