Doctorow Delays Lecture Until Fall

The Department of English and American Literature and Language has decided to postpone its spring Morris Gray Lecture until the fall due to unforeseen conflicts with the selected speaker’s publishing deadlines.

E.L. Doctorow, acclaimed fiction writer of works like “Ragtime” and “World’s Fair”, was slated to speak earlier this week, but had to reschedule to proof pages for an upcoming work.

Currently the Glucksman Professor in American Letters and Professor of English at New York University, Doctorow has garnered a slew of honors, including the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Putting the finishing touches on his next work, Doctorow regretted the timing troubles. “I don’t usually cancel speaking engagements,” he said. “I’ve just been working with proofing galleys, and writing commitments backed up on me.”

The author suggested rescheduling to a later date in May, but after meeting yesterday, Department Chair James Engell and Professor of English Peter Sacks decided to move the lecture to the fall, Sacks said. With thesis grading and other readings lined up for the next few weeks, the department’s schedule is already full for the spring.

Doctorow’s appearance in the fall will come as an addition to the bi-annual lecture series for the 2005-2006 academic year. “It is my understanding that we will have three Morris Gray Lectures next year,” said Boylston Professor of Oratory and Rhetoric Jorie Graham.

Graham, Engell, and Sacks comprise the three-member selection committee for the prestigious speaker series.

The committee deliberates to choose a speaker who “is an accomplished writer of a certain distinction whose work would be of interest to the community,” Sacks said. The two lectures, one in the fall and one in the spring, are usually given by a poet and a fiction writer.

In its decisions, the committee tries to ensure variety and cover a range of aesthetic taste, Sacks said.

In the past two years, the lecture has been cancelled twice. Last year’s speaker for the spring lecture, 2003 Nobel laureate John M. Coetzee, cancelled due to personal reasons. Two years ago, the department withdrew an invitation to fall speaker Tom Paulin after the poet’s alleged anti-Israel comments caused controversy on campus.

However, Jeffrey M. Berg, staff assistant and event coordinator for the department, assured that there is no relationship between Doctorow’s postponement and past cancellations. “There’s really no drama behind this cancellation,” he said.

Graham explained that publishers give a very short turnaround deadline for writers to proof galleys—the last opportunity to make changes before a book goes to press. “Probably outside writing the book, it’s the moment in the life of the book when you obsess most about it,” she said. “You don’t become E.L. Doctorow without obsessing over your prose.”

Established in 1929, the Morris Gray Lecture Fund finances the talks, which in the past have featured such literary luminaries as T.S. Eliot ’12.

“People think there’s a wicked charm,” Graham said, referring to the past cancellations. “It’s not a bewitched visit…it’s a great honor, and people want to relish it.”

—Staff writer Lulu Zhou can be reached at luluzhou@fas.harvard.edu.