LIVE from the NYPL: Auster on Poe: A Conversation with Paul Auster and Isaac Gewirtz

January 17, 2014

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Isaac Gewirtz in Seven Words: "Inseminated, animated, educated, regurgitated, congratulated, recalibrated, un-curated"

Paul Auster in Seven Words: "Fifty years in the trenches, still breathing"

Award-winning writer Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy,Winter Journal) talks with Isaac Gewirtz, Curator of The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, NYPL, and Poe exhibition co-curator, about his life spent reading and rereading the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Auster's first book purchase, at the age of nine, was a Modern Library edition of Poe's poems and stories, and his engagement with Poe has been consistent ever since. Auster will discuss Poe's influence on his own writing, and will revisit a lecture delivered on Poe three decades ago, currently housed with his papers in Berg collection. Co-presented by the Morgan and LIVE from the NYPL.

Paul Auster is the bestselling, award-winning author of 16 novels, including Sunset Park, Invisible, Man in the Dark, The Brooklyn Follies, The Book of Illusions, and The New York Trilogy. His work has been translated into more than forty-one languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

He has written the screenplays for Smoke (for which he won the Independent Spirit Award for best screenplay and the Silver Bear from the Berlin Film Festival), Blue in the Face, and Lulu on the Bridge (an official selection of the Cannes Film Festival), which he also directed; these three screenplays are collected in Three Films. He also wrote and directed The Inner Life of Martin Frost, which premiered at the opening of New York’s New Directors/New Films Festival in March 2007.

Isaac Gewirtz has served as Curator of The New York Public Library’s Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature since September 2000. The author of “I am With You”: Walt Whiman’s Leaves of Grass, 1855-2005, he curated NYPL's exhibition of the same title, as well as the exhibitions Victorians, Moderns, and Beats, New in the Berg Collection 1994-2001Passion’s Discipline: A History of the Sonnet in the British Isles and America (2003); and Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac On the Road, 1957-2007 (2007), accompanied by a volume of the same title, as well as Kerouac At Bat: Fantasy Sports and the King of the Beats (2009).

He co-curated the exhibition Mark Twain: A Skeptic’s Progress at the Morgan Library, co-sponsored by the Morgan and NYPL, and authored a book of the same title. He is co-curator of the Morgan Library exhibition Edgar Allan Poe: Terror of the Soul (Oct. 2013-Jan. 2014) and author of the accompanying volume, and has curated numerous exhibitions with accompanying publications at other libraries. He has also published and lectured on Virginia Woolf and on the prompt copies of Charles Dickens. Dr. Gewirtz received his Ph.D. in Early Modern European History from Columbia University.

 

*The exhibition Edgar Allan Poe: Terror of the Soul will be open at 6 p.m. especially for program attendees.

**Please note: Tickets are subject to the Morgan's policies