Pulitzer Prize-winning literary critic Michael Dirda, senior editor of "The Washington Post Book World," will discussed his new memoir , "An Open Book: Coming of Age in the Heartland " (W.W. Norton, 2003) Tuesday, Oct. 14, at the Library of Congress.

The Center for the Book's author series, Books & Beyond which is free and open to the public, highlights books of special relevance to the Library of Congress. It is co-sponsored by three of the center's national reading promotion partners: the Washington Book Publishers, the Washington Rare Book Group and the Washington chapter of the Women's National Book Association. A book-signing followed the talk.

Worried about his son’s passion for reading, Dirda’s steelworker father complained, "All that kid wants to do is stick his nose in a book." In "An Open Book," Dirda recreates a not-quite-classic American boyhood and adolescence in the Midwestern steel town of Lorain, Ohio, and later at Oberlin College. In this wistful memoir, he also describes the books, authors and fictional characters that shaped his life and inhabited his daydreams.

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