AYHAD AKHTAR is not just one of the most celebrated American writers of the past few years; he’s also one of the boldest. His tales of Islamic assimilation are as essential today as the work of Saul Bellow, James Farrell, and Vladimir Nabokov were in the 20th century in capturing the drama of the immigrant experience.

After he spent a decade in film, Mr Akhtar’s first novel, “American Dervish”, came out in 2012. It earned strong reviews and was translated into more than 20 languages. Then came a flurry of three plays, all which were produced in New York with in a year—one of which, “Disgraced,” earned the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for drama.

Mild-mannered in person, his work brims with rage. In some of his characters, this rage is in the name of Allah directed at America; in others, it is rage by Muslims towards those whose interpretation of Islam is so intolerant that they feel their beloved religion is being perverted. But because his clashes of East and West are rendered in such natural language and connected to genuine human feelings and situations, Mr Akhtar’s work has resonated with audiences rather than inflamed them.

He spoke to The Economist about Harold Pinter, being a dutiful son, and the surprisingly negative reaction of Muslim Americans to his work:

You are known mostly as a playwright these days, but your first credit as a writer was on the film “The War Within”. Did writing for films help your work in theatre and novels?

Being in the film business for so long helped me to understand the vital importance of actually connecting to your audience. If you don’t do that as a writer, you get fired.

You also acted in “The War Within”, as well as the HBO film “Too Big To Fail”, and you’ve performed and taught acting in the theater. Is that something you still want to do?

I haven’t had time to teach, sadly. I’m so busy writing now. And I don’t want to pound the pavement and do auditions. I’ve got enough work to keep me busy without putting myself through that torture. But, I miss it. I do. It’s a beautiful process losing yourself in the minutiae of a character.

I used go to Vienna twice a year and teach for three or four weeks with a group of wonderful actors. The last time, we sat around a table and worked on a [Harold] Pinter play, “Old Times,” for three weeks. I had so much fun. And then when I got back to New York, I thought “I gotta write a play.” And I just sat down and started writing. Its tough to even recall what the impetus was—so many rivulets forming in one stream—it started out as a monologue to the audience, and the monologue takes us into the dinner party, and that dinner party is the core of what would become “Disgraced”.

You mention Pinter. He was an actor first, and his plays grew out of his life as an actor. How are your plays informed by your acting?

I think that one of the things that Pinter brought to the theater because of his knowledge as an actor is how little a character has to do to hold the attention of an audience. And the corollary in my case would be to understand just how muscular and wide language can be when an actor knows how to use it.

The precision of the language in your plays is certainly Pinteresuqe, but the subjects and form are much more traditional, no?

Yes, I adore Pinter, but I don’t want to write like him. My coming of age as an artist has been to understand, increasingly, who I really am. For me the transitional figure has been Shakespeare, he was writing for all three registers of the audience: the nobility, for the middle class and the groundlings. And in my own way, I’m trying to do something like that. I want there to be something for everybody.

Your work is being performed all over America in regional theaters these days—in part because you’ve written traditional “well-made” plays. Do you want write more Pinter-esque, avante-garde pieces?

I think my tradition—whether I like it or not—is a classical Shakespearian, Brechtian one — though maybe Arthur Miller is the one person in our recent history who’s the better model. Billy Wilder once said “melodrama is what snobs call it when audiences feel something.” That’s exactly right—what is “The Wire” but an exquisitely drawn-out melodrama?

One thing in your plays that stands out is that your characters know finance—you clearly understand markets and economics. Did you study this in school or work in the financial world?

When I first moved to New York, my dad made a deal with me. He said "I’ll pay your rent if you read the WSJ [Wall Street Journal] everyday." And I’m a dutiful son—if I say I’m going to do something, I do it. So I spent two years reading the WSJ every day and reading Barron’s every weekend. I ended up spending alot of time following the markets and learning how to read a balance sheet.

Your novel “American Dervish” is about a father and a dutiful son. How autobiographical is it?

I wanted the book to have the feel of autobiography, I wanted it to feel like non-fiction, rather than fiction—even though it was a novel. I was drawing from my own life—I often paraphrase Wallace Stevens: I was building with wood out of my own forest, and stones from my own fields.

There are scenes that really question major tenents of Islam. Did you fear being ostracised—or worse—while writing it?

It didn’t occur to me, because I wrote it at a time when I was struggling so much that there was some part of me that didn’t even expect the book would ever see the light of day. It was a really difficult moment for me as a writer. I don’t even know how I didn’t give up.

But once you finished it?

My agent was very concerned because the time that the book sold was right around the time when that pastor [Terry Jones, 2010] was burning those Korans in Florida, and one of my foreign editors wanted me to take out the Koran-burning scene in my book, because she was concerned it might end up being like another “Satanic Verses” thing. So I sat with that for a week. And I realized I had written the book without one iota of fear, and I couldn’t edit it with an iota of fear. And so I kept it as it was—I made other changes through the editing process but they were all artistic.

But no there have been no fatwas?

No, there was never anything like that. But I did a reading in Chicago, and a group of Pakistani mothers came to the reading. “There’s a dozen of us here and none of them want to talk to you, I’m the only one who’s willing to raise my hand,” one of them said. “We all came because we read the book, and the consensus was: we want to find out how to make sure our children don’t turn out like you.”

So, even as your work clearly connects with a wide, mainstream American audience, is it speaking to Muslim Americans?

Actually, the reaction in the Muslim community has hurt my enthusiasm. It’s like I’m writing for my people and they don’t want to pay any attention.

And so that’s the real story, in a way, of my work: the way it’s caught between two audiences. And how the tension in the way in which all of the works I’m involved in are servicing two audiences that are often not overlapping. And you know I think that’s something that over time, as this community becomes more and more polyglot and more deeply rooted in Western experience, that audience will build. And then the critics of my work will be the young artists who feel I got it wrong. And they will start to respond in new ways and then we’ll begin to have a rich process of dialogue. But right now that’s not what’s happening.

But if one looks closely, you’re work is just as critical of Western values and society, no?

I hope so. Standard-issue narratives that cultures tell themselves have always struck me as patently false. If there's any mandate that the artist should have it’s to show that what we think is the truth is perhaps not as true as we think it is.