Join us for a conversation between two masters of the art of nonfiction, as they talk about the writing life, Lincoln and Darwin, the 9/11 Memorial, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda, food, family, Congo, France—and much more.
Adam Gopnik is the New Yorker staff writer known for his erudite articles across a staggering range of social and historical topics, which typically start with the familiar and the commonplace and go to the heart of a culture. Adam Hochschild, who teaches at the School, is the world-renowned historian whose books weave investigative inquiry and character study into bold and riveting narrative on subjects ignored by conventional histories.
Meet these exceptional writers as they discuss their latest ideas.
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Adam Gopnik, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1986. During his tenure at the magazine, he has written fiction, humor, book reviews, profiles, and reported pieces from abroad. He was the magazine’s art critic from 1987-1995, and the Paris correspondent from 1995-2000. From 2000 to 2005, he wrote a journal about New York life. His books, ranging from essay collections about Paris and food to children’s novels, include Paris to the Moon, The King in the Window, Through the Children’s Gate: A Home in New York, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life, The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food, and Winter: Five Windows on the Season. Gopnik has three National Magazine awards, for essays and for criticism, and also the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting. In March of 2013, Gopnik was awarded the medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. He lectures widely, and, in 2011, delivered the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Massey Lectures.
Adam Hochschild is a lecturer at the Graduate School of Journalism and author of acclaimed books of political history. He has written seven books, including King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award) and the New York Times bestseller To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918, a seminal narrative about the Great War that was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award. His 2005 book, Bury the Chains won the L.A. Times Book Prize. For the body of his work he has received a Lannan Literary Award, the Theodore Roosevelt-Woodrow Wilson Award of the American Historical Association, and a 2012 Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His books have been translated into fourteen languages.
In addition to his books, Hochschild has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, Granta, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, and many other newspapers and magazines.
He is currently writing a book about the Spanish Civil War that encompasses how George Orwell and other writers covered the war.