American Dream Show Guest: Professor ROGER ROSENBLATT Rosenblatt is a contributing editor and writer for the New York Times Magazine and the New Republic and appears as a regular essayist on the Public Broadcasting System's News Hour With Jim Lehrer. He is the author of many books and the winner of numerous awards for print and television, including two George Polk Awards, the George Foster Peabody Award, and the Emmy. His book, Children of War, an account of young people growing up on modern battlegrounds from Northern Ireland to the Middle East and Cambodia, won the 1983 Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize. In accepting the appointment, Rosenblatt noted that no matter how complicated and fast-moving modern life becomes, writing remains its essential skill and writers its most useful people. "I am looking forward to helping Southampton College produce those writers," he said. Southampton College, the smallest of Long Island University's three residential campuses with 1300 students, is a four-year college of liberal arts and sciences with a nationally recognized program in Marine and Environmental Science. Rosenblatt feels that the College's proximity to New York and the Hamptons allows it to draw on an unprecedented pool of writing talent. "The marine biologists have the natural resource of Long Island's waters," he said. "Southampton College can use the human resources of our area's authors to build a nationally distinguished specialty in writing. I want to be the catalyst that makes such a program possible." Rosenblatt has written about the issues of the day with insight, wit and style. His most recent project is a collaboration with Christopher Reeve describing the actor's life, career, and perseverance in the face of the recent riding accident in which he was paralyzed. In addition to Children of War, Rosenblatt's books include Black Fiction (Harvard University Press, 1974), Witness: The World Since Hiroshima (Little Brown, 1985), and Life Itself: Abortion in the American Mind (Random House, 1992), which won the Frederick G. Melcher Book Prize. The Man in the Water, a collection of Rosenblatt's essays and stories, was published by Random House in 1994. Rosenblatt received his doctorate in English and American literature in 1968 from Harvard University, where he also taught and directed the Freshman English Program. With his appointment as Master of Dunster House he became, at 29, the youngest House Master in Harvard's history. In 1991, Rosenblatt presented his humorous monologue, Free Speech in America, which ran 60 performances at New York's American Place Theater. His first play, And, opened in New York and Los Angeles in 1992. His most recent monologue, Bibliomania, ran in the fall of 1993 at the American Place. http://www.southampton.liunet.edu back to our guests... Print-Version