please welcome joseph lelyveld. [applause] >> thank you very much. i have heard some very good talks here today. i don't know if you will end on a high note. it is nice to be back here. i spend perhaps not as much time as a conscientious biographer should spend in the archives over here but once i learned how to use franklin, the search engine on the website, i took some shortcuts. i never came up with a satisfactory answer to the question of how i got interested in roosevelt in the first place and why i was writing about him. i was mainly a foreign correspondent, overall editor and i have not been that drawn to american politics so when people ask me that question as they often do, the flippant answer was it is the right exit on the throughway. i have a house on the other side of the river. i could get here in 25 minutes door to door. when i tried that no one understood what i was saying. i gave up on it. the awkward truth is i couldn't and cannot today remember exactly what drew me to fdr in the first place. i was thinking of researching and writin

reading festival is real is a prize-winning author and former new york times executive editor joseph lelyveld who looks at the final months of the life of president franklin d roosevelt. >> good afternoon, everyone.

the untold story of the partnership that defined a presidency and joseph lelyveld and his book "the final battle." and at 8:00 p.m. eastern a conversation with best-selling author gay talese from his home in new york city. >> the books that i have had published in the last couple of years are, the same kind of odd characters written by an 84-year-old, 85-year-old guy that the 24, 25-year-old guy was writing about when i was that age. >> mr. talese talks about his career over the past 60 years. his books include "the kingdom and the power" "honor thy father" and "unto the sons." >> i wanted to write about unknown people. the little woman who fed pigeons in the park or the little woman from the ukrainian who cleaned the offices of the chrysler building at 4:00 a.m. or some doorman outside the plaza hotel and what he saw and what he didn't see. i wanted to write about sometimes what it was like to be a bus driver in manhattan or clean the subways at 4:00 a.m. those obscure characters, but people to not, ordinary people do not recognize. i wanted to be a chronicler of those unrecognized, thos