Author Bill Goldstein discusses his new book, The World Broke in Two: Virgina Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster and the Year that Changed Literature. He'll be joined by Douglas Trevor, chair of the Zell's Writers Program at U-M. The talk will be followed by a book sale and signing.

The World Broke in Two tells the story of the intellectual and personal journeys four legendary writers, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence, make over the course of one pivotal year. As 1922 begins, all four are literally at a loss for words, confronting an uncertain creative future despite success in the past. The literary ground is shifting, as Ulysses is published in February and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time begins to be published in England in the autumn. Yet, dismal as their prospects seemed in January, by the end of the year Woolf has started Mrs. Dalloway, Forster has, for the first time in nearly a decade, returned to work on the novel that will become A Passage to India, Lawrence has written Kangaroo, his unjustly neglected and most autobiographical novel, and Eliot has finished—and published to acclaim—“The Waste Land."

Sponsored by the University of Michigan Library, the U-M Institute for the Humanities, the U-M Department of English Language and Literature, the Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshops on Critical Contemporary Studies and Pre-Professional Humanists, and Literati Bookstore.