Michael Silverblatt, the longtime host of the KCRW radio show \u201cBookworm\u201d \u2014 known for interviews of authors so in depth that they sometimes left his subjects astounded at his breadth of knowledge of their work \u2014 has died. He was 73. <\/p>\n
Silverblatt died Saturday at home after a protracted illness, a close friend confirmed. <\/p>\n
Although Silverblatt\u2019s 30-minute show, which ran from 1989 to 2022 and was nationally syndicated, included interviews with celebrated authors including Gore Vidal, Kazuo Ishiguro, David Foster Wallace, Susan Orlean, Joan Didion and Zadie Smith, the real star of the show was the host himself, the nasal-voiced radio personality who more than once in life was told he did not have a voice for his medium.<\/p>\n
His show represents one of the most significant archives of conversations with major literary powerhouses from the late 20th and early 21st centuries. <\/p>\n
But Silverblatt knew that he was as much a character as the people he interviewed.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m as fantastical a creature as anything in Oz or in Wonderland,\u201d he said during a talk in front of the Cornell University English department in 2010. \u201cI like it if people can say, \u2018I never met anyone like him,\u2019 and by that they should mean that it wasn\u2019t an unpleasant experience.\u201d<\/p>\n
Born in 1952, the Brooklyn native learned to love reading as a child when he was introduced to \u201cAlice\u2019s Adventures in Wonderland.\u201d Neighbors would see him walking the streets of Brooklyn with his head in a book and would sometimes call his parents out of fear he might get hurt. <\/p>\n
But until he left home for the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, at the age of 16, Silverblatt has said, he had never met an author.<\/p>\n
His college, however, was filled with such famous authors as Michel Foucault, John Barth, Donald Barthelme and J.M. Coetzee, who were all working as professors. <\/p>\n
Silverblatt was shy and too embarrassed to speak during class because of his inability to clearly pronounce the letter \u201cL,\u201d which appears three times in his own name. Yet he considered the authors to be his friends, even if they did not know it yet, he said during the Cornell talk. <\/p>\n
He would approach them after class to speak about their work.<\/p>\n
Despite his interest in literature, Silverblatt\u2019s parents wanted him to become a mail carrier, he said. The summer after his freshman year, Silverblatt worked a New York City mail route, delivering letters to the mayor\u2019s mansion on an Upper East Side route that took him past numerous old bookstores and used-books shops. During that job, he said in the Cornell talk, he purchased the complete works of Charles Dickens. <\/p>\n
Silverblatt moved to Los Angeles after college in the mid-1970s and worked in Hollywood in public relations and script development.<\/p>\n
Like many young writers in Los Angeles, he wrote a script that never got made.<\/p>\n
It was in Los Angeles that Silverblatt met Ruth Seymour, the longtime head of KCRW. <\/p>\n
Seymour had just returned to the United States from Russia and was at a dinner party where everyone was discussing Hollywood. There, she and Silverblatt became immersed in a one-on-one discussion of Russian poetry.<\/p>\n