“Friends of the Library University,” the Friends of the Library’s scholarly lecture program, returns Sunday, March 10 with two prominent academics.
Moshe Gold, Associate Professor of English at Fordham University, will speak on the early short stories of Ernest Hemingway at 1:30 p.m.
Following a brief refreshment break, Andrew Delbanco, the Alexander Hamilton Professor of American Studies at Columbia University, will discuss his latest book, “The War Before the War: Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War,” at 3 p.m.
The event is in the library’s Lapham Meeting Room.
Ernest Hemingway’s famous economical and understated style was among the most influential in 20th-century fiction and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.
Gold will discuss the pleasures and challenges of reading “In Our Time,” Hemingway’s first book of stories and arguably his first masterpiece, published in 1925.
Gold is director of the Rose Hill Writing Program at Fordham where he teaches courses in literary and critical theory, and pedagogy theory and practice. A co-editor of the Joyce Studies Annual, Gold has published on James Joyce, Plato, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and the Talmud in a variety of academic journals.
Delbanco’s new book, “The War Before the War,” explains how the dispute over runaway slaves helped fuel the Civil War. Fugitive slaves exposed the contradiction between the myth that slavery was a benign institution and the reality that a nation based on the principle of human equality was, in fact, a prison in which millions had no rights at all. Trying to preserve the Union, Congress passed the notorious Compromise of 1850, which required that fugitive slaves be returned to their masters. Instead, the Fugitive Slave Act set the nation on the path to civil war.
Delbanco earned his Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts, and doctorate degrees from Harvard University. He is the author of many notable books, including “College,” “Melville” and “The Puritan Ordeal,” and is the recipient of the Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates. Delbanco was named by Time magazine as America’s Best Social Critic and in 2012 was awarded the National Humanities Medal.
“We are so pleased to welcome these two accomplished scholars discussing such culturally important and interesting topics,” said Carol Hiller, Friends of the Library board member and co-chair of Friends of the Library University with board vice president Ellen Zimmerman. For more information on FOL events see www.pwpl.org/fol or email fol@pwpl.org.
