The John W. Kluge Center and the Center for the Book will host a public event on the life of Daniel J. Boorstin, the American historian and twelfth Librarian of Congress, on October 21, 2026, at 4pm Eastern.
The event will take place in person in room LJ-119 of the Thomas Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress and will be broadcast live on Zoom.
It will feature Jon Boorstin, son of Daniel Boorstin and author of "The American," described as "part biography, part family history, and a crucial extension of his father's work."
Daniel Boorstin founded the Center for the Book in 1977, the year Congress established it. The Library now has 56 affiliate centers — one in every state, plus the District of Columbia and five US territories: American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands.
According to the release, Daniel Boorstin, one of the most important public intellectuals of the twentieth century, spent a lifetime pondering what it means to be an American. In "The American," his son, a novelist and Oscar-nominated filmmaker, probes that question to tell the biographical story his father never told: a chronicle of family, racial conflict, and immigrant Jewish life in twentieth-century America.
Daniel Boorstin won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for "The Americans: The Democratic Experience." To answer why he wrote so little about himself, Jon Boorstin reaches back to the beginning of the 20th century and introduces readers to his immigrant grandfather, would-be southern gentleman Sam Boorstin, the youngest lawyer in Georgia's history.