Rachel Cohen, author of A Chance Meeting, the group biography that inspired this new online literary seminar, delivered its first talk: “Chance Meetings—A Personal American History.”
This talk took place on May 22, 2024. Its recording remains available for purchase. Upon registration you will receive a link to view from the Authors Guild Foundation.
A few years before the Civil War, the young boy and future novelist Henry James had his photograph taken by Mathew Brady; a few years after the War ended, the poet Walt Whitman was also photographed by Brady. What thin filaments connect these two occasions?
Chance encounters seem ephemeral, yet they may have deep and lasting effects. Bringing in moments between Ulysses Grant and Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett and Willa Cather, William James and W.E.B. Du Bois, the lecture will continue through the first World War and its ruptures, taking a view that is “at once intimate and sweeping” (The New Yorker) to see how personal history accumulates into enduring culture.
Students are encouraged to read the featured text in advance of the session, in this instance the beginning chapters of Cohen's own A Chance Meeting.
A Q&A will follow the presentation, and a recording will be made available for those who cannot attend live.
The Authors Guild Foundation is excited to present Chance Meetings, a new online literary seminar inspired by Rachel Cohen’s A Chance Meeting, a dazzling group biography that offers a striking vision of the making and remaking of the American mind and imagination from the Civil War to the Vietnam War.
Following the book’s spirit and shape, the monthly sessions feature talks on beloved and thought-provoking classics of American literature by contemporary writers with a personal connection to the works they are discussing. Cohen herself will lead two talks and circulate an e-newsletter to students in the weeks between sessions.
To register for other sessions, visit the Authors Guild Foundation / Chance Meetings collection.
