Michael Silverblatt, the longtime host of KCRW radio’s “Bookworm” — known for author interviews so in-depth that they sometimes left his listeners stunned by the breadth of knowledge of their work — has died. He was 73 years old.
Silverblatt died Saturday at home after a long illness, a close friend confirmed.
Although Silverblatt’s 30-minute program, which ran from 1989 to 2022 and was syndicated nationally, included interviews with famous writers including Gore Vidal, Kazuo Ishiguro, David Foster Wallace, Susan Orlean, Joan Didion and Zadie Smith, the real star of the show was the host herself, radio had no say in her life. his medium.
His exhibition represents one of the most important archives of influential literary dialogues from the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
But Silverblatt knew he was a character like the people he was talking to.
“I am as wonderful a creature as anything in Oz or Wonderland,” he said during a 2010 speech in front of Cornell University’s English department. “I like it when people say, ‘I’ve never met anyone like him,’ and by that they have to say it wasn’t an unpleasant experience.”
Born in 1952, the Brooklyn native learned to love reading at an early age when he was introduced to “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” Neighbors saw him walking the streets of Brooklyn with his head in a book and sometimes called his parents for fear that he might get hurt.
But until he left home for the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, at the age of 16, Silverblatt said, he had never met the writer.
However, his college was full of famous writers like Michel Foucault, John Barth, Donald Barthelme and JM Coetzee, all of whom worked as professors.
Silverblatt was shy and embarrassed to speak in class because he could not clearly pronounce the letter “L,” which appeared three times in his own name. However, he considered writers as his friends, even if they weren’t yet, he said when speaking at Cornell.
He would come to them after class to talk about their work.
Despite his interest in literature, Silverblatt’s parents wanted him to become a mail carrier, he said. The summer after his freshman year, Silverblatt worked the New York City mail route, delivering letters to the mayor’s mansion on an Upper East Side route that took him past many old bookstores and used bookstores. During that job, he said in a Cornell speech, he bought the complete works of Charles Dickens.
Silverblatt moved to Los Angeles after college in the mid-1970s and worked in Hollywood in public relations and script development.
Like many young writers in Los Angeles, he wrote a script that never got made.
It was in Los Angeles that Silverblatt met Ruth Seymour, the longtime head of KCRW.
Seymour had just returned to the United States from Russia and was at a party where everyone was talking about Hollywood. There, he and Silverblatt engaged in a one-on-one discussion of Russian poetry.
“He’s such a big bad guy that the whole world just fell apart,” Seymour told Times columnist Lynell George in 1997. “After that I just turned around and asked him: ‘Have you ever thought of doing radio?'”
For the next 33 years, that’s exactly what he thought.
“Michael was a genius. He was amazing and always, always, always brilliant,” said Alan Howard, who edited “Bookworm” for 31 years.
“It’s an amazing archive that exists, and I don’t think anyone else has ever created an archive of smart and interesting people being asked about their work,” Howard said. “Michael was very proud of this game. He gave his life to this game.”
Silverblatt once dreamed of being on the other side of the microphone, as a writer himself, Howard said. But he faced difficulties in writing books in his mid-20s and stopped writing.
“Finally, he found peace with the truth of that,” Howard said.
Instead of writing, he became a collector of a large number of works of other writers – in his library and in the warehouse in his head. He had an amazing memory for the books he read.
Silverblatt converted an apartment next to his Fairfax apartment into a library where he stored thousands of books, Howard said.
“It was heaven,” he said. “It was a wonderful library.”
“He was one of a kind,” said Jennifer Ferro, now president of KCRW. “He had a voice that you didn’t expect to be on the radio.”
Alan Felsenthal, a poet who looked to Silverblatt as a mentor, called Silverblatt’s voice “sensitive and tender.”
Felsenthal said the show was about creating an environment of “endless compassion,” where writers can share things they might not share in everyday conversation.
“Michael was a kind person, really alone. And his voice is there,” Felsenthal said.
One of the most important aspects of Silverblatt’s approach is that he not only read the book he was discussing on his show that day, but he also read all the works of the authors he discussed.
“A key writer will come in and throw in Michael’s deep insight into the work we’re doing,” Howard said.
David Foster Wallace, in another interview, said he wanted Silverblatt to marry him.
Silverblatt said he strived to read the author’s entire work, but he never claimed to have read it all if he hadn’t.
“I usually try to read a writer’s complete work … That’s not always true, and I never say it if it’s not true. But more often than not, I’ve, at least, read a lot of work. And sometimes it’s a superhuman challenge,” he said in a 1997 Times column.
An avid reader said that the best books, the ones that brought him joy, were not the ones that set us free from this strange and difficult world.
He said: “My favorite books make life difficult for me.”
Silverblatt is survived by his sister, Joan Bykofsky.
