i'm pleased to have stephen greenblatt back at this table. welcome. >> thank you very much. >> rose: this is one greatstory. >> it is a great story. thank you. i don't take credit for it, except that it's a magnificent story. >> rose: tell the story offindir section at yale the book that you found. >> when i was an undergraduate, with very little money in my pock, i picked up at the end of the year in a bin of books for sale a book that cost a dime with a cover that caught my attention. i'd never heard of the author. >> rose: you bought it for thec? >> absolutely. i judged the book by the cover. the author was someone i'd never heard of. the title i'd never heard of. i saw it was a book about ancient physics. i thought, hmm, i'm not interested in ancient physics, but e cover was alluring. two pairs of legs up the sky doing -- you couldn't tell what it was, but it was from a surrealistic painting, so i bought it, and it spoke to me. itas one of those experiences that one has in life in which suddenly something is with you, in the room with you

. >> stephen greenblatt, what did you write about shakespeare that others haven't? >> i tried to bring shakespeare back into the world, in the world he lived in and in our world. i tried to take the traces that he left, little chicken scratchings really and make a human being out of it. >> what's your reaction when you read about professors saying didn't even exist? >> i don't think too many professors say this, but i think people have this idea -- >> or he didn't write these? >> people have a lot of strange ideas about a lot of things, brian. in the case of shakespeare, he left a lot of records. he was famous in his own time as a playwright and it would require conspiracy theories quite of an extraordinary magnitude to cover his tracks. >> are you comfortable that he wrote everything -- how many plays? >> yeah, 38. lots of poems. did he write absolutely everything by himself alone, no, absolutely not. he collaborated on a bunch of the plays. he worked in the medium in which collaboration was quite widespread like television writing or movie writing. but what's very

the 602nd annual national book awards another of the nonfiction nominees, harvard professor stephen greenblatt his most recent book is called the swerved, how the world became modern. first of all, what do you mean by this work? >> in my case why the world did not continue in the same direction, but why it shifted as it did in the renaissance toward the things that we now recognize as our world and not the one that existed in the middle ages. >> who is tied his lucretius? >> he was the author of an ancient poem written 2,000 years ago that said that the world was made up of atoms and emptiness and nothing else. the atoms of swerved. because they swerved everything came into being. in unpredictable ways. >> where did you find this palm? is a well-known? >> it is. famous in ancient times with been lost for more than a thousand years and came back one day in january in 1417, which is the subject of a book. i encountered it when i was young and buy a book more less randomly at the books sell. >> basically writing about this palm and how it says the world pro who. >> beautiful and powerful, but als