Speaker Bio

After being the youngest House Master in the history of Harvard, Roger Rosenblatt served a term as director of education at the National Endowment for the Humanities. His essays for “The News Hour” have won a Peabody and an Emmy award, and essays for Time magazine have won two George Polk Awards. Mr. Rosenblatt has also been a columnist and editor-at-large for Life magazine, the editor of U.S. News & World Report, a columnist and editorial board member of The Washington Post and editor-at-large of Time, Inc. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, The New Republic, Esquire and elsewhere.

A Fulbright scholar with five honorary doctorates, Rosenblatt is the author of five Off-Broadway plays and twelve books including a collection of his writings, The Man in the Water, Coming Apart: A Memoir of the Harvard Wars of 1969, and the national bestseller, Rules for Aging. His Children of War (1983) won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has been published in seven languages. Lapham Rising, also a national bestseller, was his first novel. Rosenblatt’s latest work, Making Toast: A Family Story, chronicles the sudden death of his 38-year old daughter and the decision he and his wife made to move in with their son-in-law to help raise the three grandchildren.