Ranked #1
Saul Bellow and American Prose
Saul Bellow and American Prose
Saul Bellow has been called the greatest writer of American prose of the 20th century. Zachary Leader, professor of Engl... Read more
18 Feb 2016
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55mins
Ranked #2
Hilary Mantel: “I Met a Man Who Wasn’t There”
Hilary Mantel: “I Met a Man Who Wasn’t There”
Tudor statesman Thomas Cromwell was described by an eminent historian as “not biographable.” Faced with an intractable p... Read more
11 May 2017
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51mins
Ranked #3
You Don’t Know Jack
You Don’t Know Jack
In recognition of the centenary of Jack London’s death, The Huntington’s Sue Hodson, curator of literary manuscripts and... Read more
10 Dec 2016
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1hr 3mins
Ranked #4
Pasadena and the Making of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper”
Pasadena and the Making of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman came to Pasadena to live in 1888. Here she wrote “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” a harrowing story of ... Read more
9 Nov 2010
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41mins
Ranked #5
Excavating the Book
Excavating the Book
Stephen Orgel, J. E. Reynolds Professor in Humanities at Stanford University, discusses books and their marketing throug... Read more
20 Mar 2017
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1hr 1min
Ranked #6
Becoming Gay in the 1960s: Reading “A Single Man”
Becoming Gay in the 1960s: Reading “A Single Man”
Novelist Edmund White (“A Boy’s Own Story”) discusses the lasting impression that Christopher Isherwood’s groundbreaking... Read more
30 Sep 2016
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26mins
Ranked #7
Making a Literature: Black Writing and Jim Crow (Distinguished Fellow Lecture)
Making a Literature: Black Writing and Jim Crow (Distinguished Fellow Lecture)
Kenneth Warren, professor of English at the University of Chicago and the R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellow for 2010... Read more
2 Mar 2011
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54mins
Ranked #8
Johnson Agonistes: Portraying Samuel Johnson
Johnson Agonistes: Portraying Samuel Johnson
By the time James Boswell published his monumental biography of his friend Samuel Johnson in 1791, the latter’s life had... Read more
6 May 2010
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53mins
Ranked #9
Precarious: From Manuscript to Print in Early America (Zamorano Lecture)
Precarious: From Manuscript to Print in Early America (Zamorano Lecture)
David Hall discusses the challenges of writing and publishing in colonial America, when authors sent documents to Englan... Read more
14 Jan 2011
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1hr 3mins
Ranked #10
Sam and Jamie: ‘No Theory Please, We’re British’
Sam and Jamie: ‘No Theory Please, We’re British’
The famous relationship between lexicographer Samuel Johnson and his friend and biographer, James Boswell, is discussed ... Read more
6 May 2010
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47mins