David Sedaris will be the speaker for the Lackawanna County Library System’s 2021 American Masters Lecture, Wednesday, Sept. 8, at 7 p.m. in the Scranton Cultural Center.
Courtesy of Jenny Lewis
Humor writer has vast following here and abroad
David Sedaris, whose personal essays and humorous social commentary have earned him recognition as one of America’s greatest living humor writers, will be the speaker for the Lackawanna County Library System’s 2021 American Masters Lecture, Wednesday, Sept. 8, at 7 p.m. in the Scranton Cultural Center.
Free tickets for the event will be available at the libraries and online.
Sedaris is the author of 11 collections of essays, many of which appeared first in The New Yorker.
The titles of his books alone suggest the wit to be found within: Barrel Fever, Holidays on Ice, Naked, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, and Theft By Finding: Diaries (1977-2002).
He is also the author of Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary, a collection of fables with illustrations by Ian Falconer.
Each of these books was an immediate hit.
His most recent collection of essays, Calypso, published in 2018, was a New York Times best-seller, and a Washington Post Best Book of the Year.
The audiobook of Calypso was nominated for a 2019 Grammy in the Best Spoken Word Album category.
Said a reviewer for the Chicago Tribune, “Sedaris’s droll assessment of the mundane and the eccentrics who inhabit the world’s crevices make him one of the greatest humorists writing today.”
The San Francisco Chronicle added, “Sedaris belongs on any list of people writing in English at the moment who are revising our ideas about what’s funny.”
In addition to articles and books, Sedaris has gained an audience through his commentaries on CBS Sunday Morning and his voice has become known from National Public Radio.
He was born in Johnson City, New York, where his father worked as an IBM engineer before moving his family to Raleigh, North Carolina, where Sedaris grew up.
Much of his early writing was about his family and the cultural milieu he experienced as the son of an Episcopalian mother and Greek Orthodox father. He was raised in his father’s faith.
His formal education was rather scattered. He briefly attended Western Carolina University before transferring to Kent State University, where he quickly dropped out. Eventually he moved to Chicago, where he graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Throughout his teens and twenties, Sedaris experimented with visual and performance art, and the failure he experienced then gave him fodder for several early essays.
His pieces regularly appear in The New Yorker and have twice been included in “The Best American Essays.” There are over ten million copies of his books in print and they have been translated into 25 languages.
In 2018 he was awarded the Terry Southern Prize for Humor, as well as the Medal for Spoken Language from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
His sister, actress, author and comedian Amy Sedaris, was a speaker for the Library System’s lecture series in 2014. Together they have written several plays under the name “The Talent Family.” Most have been performed at La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in New York City.
His appearance in Scranton will be the initial stop on his first post-pandemic tour. Due to COVID-19, the American Masters Lecture was not held in 2020.
“We are extremely proud to be hosting David Sedaris during his tour of American cities and campuses,” said Mary Garm, director of the Lackawanna County Library System.
Previous American Masters Lecture speakers have included historians Michael Beschloss, Douglas Brinkley, David McCullough and James McPherson; author, journalist and film maker Sebastian Junger; author, actress, social critic and humorist Fran Lebowitz; theoretical physicist and futurist Michio Kaku; undersea explorer and Titanic discoverer Robert Ballard; and legendary Dallas Cowboy running back Emmitt Smith.
2019’s speaker was Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner for his 2016 novel The Underground Railroad. His book, The Nickel Boys, published in 2019, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His most recent book, Harlem Shuffle, is slated for publication in September 2021.
