Night School with Garry Wills

Today in local conversation

One Pot and the Sorrento Hotel have partered to bring you Night School: a year of creative and stimulating programming, from Drinking Lessons, to chamber music, to books to Midnight Symposiums, which is what's on this evening.

It's too late to buy tickets online for tonight's event (try your luck at the door if you're optimistic), but it seemed worthwhile to know about their guest, Garry Wills. Even if you can't break bread with him tonight, he is the sort of prolific thinker to be aware of. From the Night School blog:

Garry Wills is a Puitzer Prize winning author, journalist, and historian specializing in American politics, American political history and ideology and the Roman Catholic Church. He has written nearly 40 books and has been a frequent reviewer for the New York Review of Books since 1973.[1]

A conservative and early protégé of William F. Buckley, Jr as a young man, Wills became increasingly liberal through the 1960s, driven by his coverage of the civil rights and the anti-Vietnam War movements. Although a Catholic, he has been an excoriating critic of the Vatican and its policies and theology.

He won a Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction[4] for Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (1993), which describes the background and effect of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863. He was awarded the National Medal for the Humanities in 1998. He has twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award, including as a co-winner for nonfiction in 1978 for Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence.

Book covers from Amazon.com.