T. J. Stiles: The Significance of One Life -- The Individual's Role in History, and Biography's Place in a Digital Age September 22, 2010

Talk by T. J. Stiles, winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award

How important is the individual in the course of human events? How important is the full life study in our short-attention span digital age? T.J. Stiles discusses the challenges of writing biography, drawing on his experience with his the award-winning, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (Knopf), which won the 2010 Pulitzer prize for Biography and the 2009 National Book Award for nonfiction. This book was also named a New York Times Notable Book, and one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Chronicle, Kansas City Star, and the Washington Post.

T. J. Stiles has held the Gilder Lehrman Fellowship in American History at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, taught at Columbia University, and served as adviser for the PBS series The American Experience. His first book, Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, won the Ambassador Book Award and the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship, and was a New York Times Notable Book.

Admission Members of Mechanics' Institute: Free
Public: $12

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