The writer Garth Risk Hallberg explores the affinities between the modern social novel and the modern city. From Dickens’s London to Richard Wright’s Chicago, from the Paris of Les Misérables to the Boston of The Bostonians, the two have developed in parallel. But for a novelist, the relationship goes deeper than content.
(50:05) Following his lecture, Hallberg participates in a conversation with the novelist Claire Messud RI '05, a senior lecturer on fiction at Harvard University. Messud’s books include The Woman Upstairs (Knopf, 2013),and The Emperor’s Children (Knopf, 2006).
Moderated by Lizabeth Cohen, dean of the Radcliffe Institute and the Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies, a 20th-century urban historian whose book, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge University Press, 1990), won the Bancroft Prize in American History.
This is a 2016–2017 Kim and Judy Davis Dean’s Lecture.
