Caleb Crain to deliver 2010 Harding Lecture

This year’s Walter Harding Lecture at SUNY Geneseo will be delivered by Caleb Crain.

The lecture, titled “Melville’s Secrets,” will be held Thursday, September 23, at 4 p.m. in the SUNY Geneseo College Union Ballroom. The event is free and open to the public.

Crain is the author of American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation (Yale University Press, 2001) and of numerous articles about American literature and culture in newspapers, magazines, and scholarly journals. He wrote the introduction and notes for two American novels published by The Modern Library: The Algerine Captive (1797) and Wieland (1798). His essays, reviews, and fiction have appeared in such venues as The New Yorker, The Nation, The New York Times Magazine, and The New York Review of Books. His novella Sweet Grafton was published in the online journal n+1. His blog, Steamboats Are Ruining Everything, won the Cliopatra Award for Best Writer in 2007.