San Antonio (Aug. 30, 2007) — Novelist Allan Gurganus, who has been called a “Mark Twain for our age,” will deliver the 2007 Ewing Halsell Distinguished Lecture on Wednesday, Sept. 5, at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, 7703 Floyd Curl Drive. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, begins at 7 p.m. in Lecture Hall 3.102 near the Dolph Briscoe Jr. Library.
The Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics in the Health Science Center School of Medicine is presenting the lecture with support from the Ewing Halsell Foundation.
Gurganus’ 1989 book, “Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All,” spent eight months on The New York Times best-seller list and brought him the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The novel has sold more than 2 million copies in 12 languages. It was adapted into a CBS movie starring Donald Sutherland, Diane Lane and Cecily Tyson.
His other works include “White People,” a collection of stories and novellas, and the novel “Plays Well with Others.” In 2006, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation named him a Fellow in recognition of his fiction writing.
Gurganus’ essays frequently appear in The New York Times. He lives in a small town in North Carolina, his home state.
“Novelists don’t really start life till turning forty,” he once said. “By that measure, as an artist, I am just eighteen. I have only just begun.”
The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio is the leading research institution in South Texas and one of the major health sciences universities in the world. With an operating budget of $536 million, the Health Science Center is the chief catalyst for the $14.3 billion biosciences and health care sector in San Antonio’s economy. The Health Science Center has had an estimated $35 billion impact on the region since inception and has expanded to six campuses in San Antonio, Laredo, Harlingen and Edinburg. More than 22,000 graduates (physicians, dentists, nurses, scientists and allied health professionals) serve in their fields, including many in Texas. Health Science Center faculty are international leaders in cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, aging, stroke prevention, kidney disease, orthopaedics, research imaging, transplant surgery, psychiatry and clinical neurosciences, pain management, genetics, nursing, allied health, dentistry and many other fields.