The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve:
From Fiction to Faith

Stephen Greenblatt In conversation with author Jack Miles
Thursday, Oct 5, 2017 | 7:30pm Mark Taper Auditorium-Central Library

Stephen Greenblatt—the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author of The Swerve and Will in the World—investigates the life of one of humankind’s greatest stories. His newest book, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, explores the enduring narrative of humanity’s first parents. Tracking the tale into the deep past, Greenblatt uncovers the tremendous theological, artistic, and cultural investment over centuries that made these fictional figures so profoundly resonant in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim worlds and also so very “real” to millions of people even in the present. In a conversation with Jack Miles, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of God: A Biography, Greenblatt will demystify how—for better or worse—the biblical origin story permeates our lives today.

Stephen Greenblatt

Stephen Greenblatt is John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. Recipient of the Holberg Prize, he is the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award- winning author of The Swerve and Will in the World, and the general editor of The Norton Shakespeare and The Norton Anthology of English Literature.

Jack Miles

Jack Miles, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Religious Studies at the University of California, Irvine, has written on religion, politics, and culture for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The WorldPost and many other publications. His book God: A Biography won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996. The Norton Anthology of World Religions, of which he was general editor, was published in 2014 in hardcover and in 2015 in a six-volume paperback edition. A MacArthur Fellow during the years 2003-2007, he is currently completing a new work to be entitled God in the Qur’an.

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Main Image: Giovanni di Paolo, The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise, 1445

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