John McPhee has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1965 and has written more than thirty acclaimed books that began on the magazine’s pages. But few readers know or fully appreciate the true breadth of his writing. Looking for a Story is a complete reader’s guide to McPhee’s vast published work, documenting much rarely seen or connected with McPhee, including remarkable early writing for Time magazine published without his name. In chronicling McPhee’s career where he broke ground applying devices long associated with fiction to the literature of fact, Noel Rubinton gave us insights into McPhee’s techniques, choice of subjects, and research methods, shedding light on how McPhee turns complicated subjects like geology into compelling stories. Beyond detailing more than seventy years of McPhee’s writing, Rubinton recounted McPhee’s half century as a Princeton University writing professor, a little known part of his legacy. McPhee inspired generations of students who wrote hundreds of books of their own, also catalogued here. With an incisive foreword by New Yorker staff writer and former McPhee student Peter Hessler, Looking for a Story also includes extensive annotated listings of articles about McPhee, reviews of his books, and interviews, readings, and speeches. Whether you are already an admirer of McPhee or new to his writings, this book provides an invaluable road map to his rich body of work.

About the Speaker

Noel Rubinton is a journalist whose writing has appeared in leading publications such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. He was a reporter and editor for Newsday for many years. His writing has spanned many fields, including government, politics, culture, transportation, and history. His essay about H.P. Lovecraft and Providence is collected in the New York Times book Footsteps: Literary Pilgrimages Around the World and he wrote the foreword to Repression, Re-invention, & Rugelach: A History of Jews at Colgate. A graduate of Deerfield Academy and Brown University, he has been reading John McPhee’s writing for many decades.

Cullen Murphy is an editor at large at The Atlantic, where for two decades he was managing editor. He has also been an editor at large at Vanity Fair. His books include Just Passing Through: A Seven-Decade Roman Holiday (2022), Cartoon County: My Father and His Friends in the Golden Age of Make-Believe (2017), and Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America (2007). For 25 years he wrote the comic strip Prince Valiant.

A name known to many, a man known to few. Henri Willis Bendel was celebrated in his lifetime as a tastemaker and merchant but is now a nearly lost figure. His journey from a humble upbringing in late-nineteenth-century Louisiana to the pinnacle of high society was remarkable: Starting with a small hat shop in Greenwich Village in 1896, he eventually redrew the map of fashion retail, turning then-strictly residential Fifty-Seventh Street into “the Rue de la Paix of New York.” He introduced his discerning clients to such influential designers as Schiaparelli, Molyneaux, and Chanel. He outfitted Astors, Vanderbilts, and stars of stage and screen from the sunset of the Gilded Age past the dawn of the Jazz Age. But he also brought a democratization to fashion with accessible offerings and clearance sales. In syndicated newspaper columns he dispensed pithy and impassioned fashion advice to women across the nation who might never set foot in his store.

Winner of the 2024 INDIE award for best biography, Henri Bendel and the Worlds He Fashioned traces his life from his upbringing in a large, tight-knit Jewish family headed by his immigrant stepfather and mother — herself an enterprising merchant — to his early dry goods business, then to the romance that led him to New York and the tragedy that would set in motion his rapid ascent. Bendel was treated as a kindred soul in the Paris salons of haute couture and throughout Europe, where he amassed rare antiques, then built dramatic showplaces back home in which to place them. All the while he stayed loyal to his kin down south and to his chosen family up East, which consisted of blood relatives and two beloved companions whose true place in Henri’s heart required discretion, owing to the constrictions of the time.

The book also recounts the history of Mr. Bendel’s storied store, from its bustles-and-corsets years through the days of furs and flappers, then the tailored chic of the 1930s and ’40s. In more modern times, the legendary president Geraldine Stutz made Bendel’s a cornucopia of cutting-edge designers and innovative merchandising, a lure for the most famous and fashionable women in America. In its long, final era, Leslie Wexner of the Limited expanded the store’s reach and solicited younger clients, emphasizing jewelry, accessories, and dazzle. Those various and sometimes-at-odds incarnations define Bendel’s extraordinary 123-year run under the iconic brown and white stripes first sketched by Henri, who himself said, “A designer, to be successful, must feel the trend of the times.”

About the Speaker

Tim Allis was a senior editor at In Style for twelve years. Prior to that, he was a staff writer at D magazine (Dallas) and People. He has contributed articles to Out, Men’s Health, Time Out New York, Saveur, CNN, and Playbill, among others. A dedicated theatergoer, he periodically dabbles in playwriting. As Henri Bendel did, he calls both Lafayette, Louisiana, and New York City home.

Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. presented a sweeping history of changing critical standards and values in American art across 200 years. Art lovers, perplexed why their favorite artists are no longer on the walls of their local museums, will find an incisive view of why change is constant. All art lovers will find a cautionary lesson about the unpredictable future.

Each generation of experts believes their own taste is the last word, confident in their opinions about the art that was the best of their time.

As Stebbins writes, “People are inclined to view past changes in taste as unique misjudgments that will not happen again… How unthinking, how stupid, they think, not realizing that the pattern has been repeated again and again in the past and will be in the future. We now recognize that the process is a continual one. Each past canon was established for good reason; there are no mistakes, there is only history. Many of the favored artists of any period including our own will drop from favor, something that art dealers never tell their clients, or museum curators their boards.”

Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr. was in the center of every development in American art collecting and exhibitions from 1960 well into the 2000s. He is uniquely able to put recent shifts in the canon within the context of a regular, generational shift in taste that tells us much about the value that is placed on art — including who decides what matters and what does not.

Profusely illustrated, fascinating, controversial, deeply informed, Rethinking American Art: Collectors, Critics, and the Changing Canon (David R. Godine, 2025) is for anyone who wants a greater understanding of the forces that shape the world of art.

About the Speaker

Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. is one of the most admired scholars of American art. He is the author of nearly a hundred publications ranging from studies of John Singleton Copley, Washington Allston, and John James Audubon to those devoted to Martin Johnson Heade, Winslow Homer and many aspects of contemporary art and photography. He has served as curator of American art at Yale University, Harvard, and the Museum of Fine Arts, and has taught at those universities and at Boston University. His new book, Rethinking American Art, draws on his lifetime of experiences in the art world, as he describes the way artistic standards are constantly changing, and how scholarly trends mirror the art market. His book also sheds new light on many outstanding collectors, including Maxim Karolik and Alice Walton.

Peter Cormack presented the first comprehensive account of Charles J. Connick, America’s most innovative and influential stained glass artist working in the first half of the twentieth century.

When Charles J. Connick (1875–1945) began his stained glass career in Pittsburgh in the 1890s, America’s fascination with the newly invented “opalescent” windows of Tiffany and La Farge meant that the original traditions of the art form were almost forgotten. Connick made it his life’s mission to reassert the values of the medieval craft, successfully persuading twentieth-century Americans that these could inspire powerfully expressive modern glass as well as thrilling new imagery.

This book presents the dynamic trajectory of Connick’s artistic development. Refuting any notion of Connick as a revivalist, Peter Cormack examines the diverse cultural influences that shaped Connick’s art, including his creative interaction with European stained glass and his friendship with poets such as Robert Frost. Richly illustrated and based on decades of research, it analyzes Connick’s work in the context of the Arts and Crafts and “Modern Gothic” movements in architecture and the applied arts, showcasing stained glass works found throughout some of the most spectacular buildings in the United States, including New York’s St. John the Divine Cathedral and San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral. His fruitful collaborations with Ralph Adams Cram, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, Maginnis & Walsh, and other leading architects are also documented in detail.

About the Speaker

Peter Cormack MBE, FSA, is a historian, writer on applied arts, illustrator and occasional designer of stained glass. He was formerly Curator of the William Morris Gallery, London, where he curated many pioneering exhibitions of work by Morris and the Arts & Crafts Movement. He has been the American Friends of the V&A Research Fellow at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, and is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, to whom he is the Honorary Curatorial Adviser for Kelmscott Manor, Morris’s Oxfordshire home. He is an Honorary Fellow and Vice-President of the British Society of Master Glass Painters. His books include Arts & Crafts Stained Glass (2015) and Charles J. Connick, America’s Visionary Stained Glass Artist (2024), both published by Yale University Press. In 2009, he was appointed a member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II “for services to art and heritage.”

Bridges as Structural Art showcases twenty-five bridges designed by Miguel Rosales and his firm Rosales + Partners, Inc, including bridges local to the Boston area such as the Zakim Bridge, the Russell Bridge, the Appleton Bridge, and more.

Rosales + Partners is characterized by a unique combination of architectural sensitivity, engineering knowledge, and communication skills that allows it to create iconic, cost-effective and technically innovative bridges. These transformational bridges have become a source of pride in the areas in which they have been built and tangible expressions of the art of bridge design.

About the Speaker

Miguel Rosales is the president and principal designer of Rosales +, with more than thirty-five years of expertise as a leading architect and designer for major bridges both in the U.S. and abroad. Renowned for his focus on bridge aesthetics and design, he earned a licentiate degree in architecture from Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala in 1985, and completed a master’s degree in architecture studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987. He has received grants from the NEA, AIA/AAF, and MIT to research bridge and infrastructure design and is the recipient of numerous national and international bridge design and engineering awards. He is known for his ability to balance technical and aesthetic principles, conceiving cost-effective architectural bridge enhancements and delivering iconic bridges.

This talk is presented in partnership with the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art

This life study shows Constantine Cavafy as a flawed genius who sacrificed love to change the course of world poetry. Seeking to capture the complexities of Cavafy’s life and art, Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis approach the biography thematically.

The book begins in an Alexandria hospital in 1933 where the poet lies dying, surrounded by friends. In rich detail, it chronicles his family, the vicissitudes of their fortunes, and their eventual poverty as they leave Egypt and move to Liverpool, London, and Istanbul. As the poet reaches adulthood, the biography centers on his beloved Alexandria, the city that nourished his imagination and became for him a metaphor of both his poetry and modern life. The authors then examine the poet’s relationships with his teenage companions, his friends of middle age, and those individuals in later life whom he enlisted in his steadfast pursuit of fame.

Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography also looks closely at Cavafy’s poetry and artistic journey, from his early poetic experiments to his startling reinvention in middle age, when he renounced much of what he had written and developed a new poetics, which the world now recognizes as Cavafian. The study ends with the poet’s memorial service, when his literary heir tries to untangle Cavafy’s contradictions and safeguard the legacy of the man who risked everything for a global reputation.

About the Speakers

Peter Jeffreys is an Associate Professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston and has written, translated and edited a number of books on Cavafy: Eastern Questions: Hellenism and Orientalism in the Writings of E. M. Forster; C. P. Cavafy; The Forster-Cavafy Letters: Friends at a Slight Angle; C. P. Cavafy: Selected Prose Works; Reframing Decadence: C. P. Cavafy’s Imaginary Portraits; and Approaches to Teaching the Works of C.P. Cavafy. He is a member of the International Cavafy Archive Academic Committee at the Onassis Foundation and served as a consultant for the exhibits at the Cavafy House in Alexandria and the Cavafy Archive Space in Athens.

Maria Koundoura is the Associate Provost for academic programs at Emerson College. She also holds the rank of full professor of literature in the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing, where she served as department chair for two terms. She is the author of The Greek Idea: The Formation of National and Transnational Identities and of Transnational Culture, Transnational Identity: The Politics and Ethics of Global Culture Exchange. Her next book project, for which she has received a Folger Shakespeare Library Summer Research Fellowship, is Desire Lines: Metaphors of the Global City. One of the founding editors of the Stanford Humanities Review, Koundoura was also editor of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Launching Liberty: The Epic Race to Build the Ships That Took America to War

Out of nothing but the government’s behest, a few bold men conjured a giant ship-building industry in 1940 and launched the ships that took America to war and to victory.

In 1940, the shadow of war loomed large over American life. President Roosevelt understood that it wasn’t a matter of if the United States would be pulled into battle, but when. He foresaw a “new kind of war,” one that hinged on efforts at home. Long before the attack on Pearl Harbor, German U-boats were relentlessly attacking American vessels, prompting Roosevelt to launch a monumental ship-building campaign. He knew that no matter how much weaponry and how many tanks, planes and trucks America built, the “Arsenal of Democracy” would be useless unless it could be brought in massive volume, and at breakneck speed, to troops fighting overseas.

Launching Liberty tells the remarkable story of how FDR partnered with private businessmen to begin the production of cargo freighters longer than a football field — ships he affectionately dubbed “ugly ducklings.” These colossal Liberty Ships took over six months to build at the start of his $350 million emergency shipbuilding program, far too long. The government turned to Henry Kaiser, the man who had delivered the Boulder Dam ahead of schedule and under budget, but had never built a ship in his life. Kaiser established a network of shipyards from coast to coast and recruited tens of thousands of workers eager to contribute to the war effort. Many, particularly African Americans and women, traveled from some of the most downtrodden, rural parts of the nation to help their country and to find a better life of greater equality.

As German U-boats maintained their pace of attack, Roosevelt and Kaiser initiated a bold, nationwide competition among shipyards to see who could construct ships the fastest. Driven by duty and the thrill of innovation, workers reduced the shipbuilding timeline from months to weeks and then to days. Launching Liberty is a tapestry of voices reflecting the diverse American experience of World War II. From the halls of the White House to the cramped quarters of half-finished cargo ships, we hear from naval architects, welders, nurses, engineers, daycare providers, and mothers balancing family life with the demands of wartime economy. This book uncovers the inspiring, untold stories of those who rose to the challenge during one of America’s most tumultuous times.

About the Speaker

Doug Most, a native of Rhode Island, is a lifelong journalist and author whose career has spanned newspapers, magazines, and universities up and down the East Coast, with stops in Washington, DC, South Carolina, New Jersey, and Boston. He was named Journalist of the Year while at The Record in Bergen County, New Jersey, for his coverage of a tragic story about two teens charged with killing their newborn, a story he turned into a true-crime book titled Always in Our Hearts. After a stint at Boston Magazine, he worked for fifteen years at The Boston Globe, as the Sunday Magazine editor, and deputy managing editor/special projects. His articles have appeared in Best American Sports Writing and Best American Crime Writing. His 2014 nonfiction book, The Race Underground, told the story of the birth of subways in America in the late 1800s and was adapted into a PBS/American Experience documentary. The New York Times called the book “a sweeping narrative of late-19th-century intrigue.” He works now as the executive editor and an assistant vice president at Boston University. He holds a BA from George Washington University in political communication.