Center for Publishing

Wally Lamb: On Publishing, From An Author's Viewpoint

Andrea Chambers interviews Wally Lamb

In March, author Wally Lamb spoke with graduate publishing students at a lunchtime event at NYU-SCPS. Center for Publishing director Andrea Chambers interviewed Lamb about his improbable, meteoric rise from high school English teacher to bestselling novelist and his take on publishing from an author's point of view.  He concluded the nearly two-hour program with a reading from his latest book.

Listen to highlights from the event and Wally Lamb reading from his new novel, The Hour I First Believed.

About the Author

Wally Lamb’s first two novels, She’s Come Undone (Simon & Schuster/Pocket, 1992) and I Know This Much Is True (HarperCollins/ReganBooks, 1998), were both number one on the New York Times Best Seller List, New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and featured titles of Oprah’s Book Club. I Know This Much Is True was a Book of the Month Club main selection and the June 1999 featured selection of the Bertelsmann Book Club, the national book club of Germany. Between them, She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True have been translated into 18 languages. 

Lamb is also the editor of the nonfiction anthologies Couldn’t Keep It to Myself: Testimonies from Our Imprisoned Sisters (HarperCollins/ReganBooks, 2003) and I’ll Fly Away (HarperCollins, 2007), collections of autobiographical essays which evolved from a writing workshop Lamb facilitates at Connecticut’s York Correctional Institute, a maximum-security prison for women. He has served as a Connecticut Department of Corrections volunteer since 1999. 

Wally Lamb is a Connecticut native who holds bachelor's and master's degrees in teaching from the University of Connecticut and a M>F.A. in Writing from Vermont College. Lamb was in the ninth year of his 25-year career as a high school English teacher at his alma mater, the Norwich Free Academy, when he began to write fiction in 1981. He has also taught writing at the University of Connecticut, where he directed the English Department’s creative writing program. 

Honors for Wally Lamb include: the Connecticut Center for the Book’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the Connecticut Bar Association’s Distinguished Public Service Award, the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, the Connecticut Governor’s Arts Award, The National Institute of Business/Apple Computers “Thanks to Teachers” Award. Lamb has received Distinguished Alumni awards from Vermont College and the University of Connecticut. He was the 1999 recipient of the New England Book Award for fiction. I Know This Much Is True won the Friends of the Library USA Readers’ Choice Award for best novel of 1998, the result of a national poll, and the Kenneth Johnson Memorial Book Award, which honored the novel’s contribution to the anti-stigmatization of mental illness. She’s Come Undone was a 1992 “Top Ten” Book of the Year selection in People magazine and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Best First Novel of 1992. 

Wally Lamb’s third novel, The Hour I First Believed, explores chaos theory by interfacing several generations of a fictional Connecticut family with such historical American events as the Civil War, the Columbine High School shootings of 1999, the Iraq War, and Hurricane Katrina. The book was published by HarperCollins in November of 2008.

Book Description: The Hour I First Believed

When 47-year-old high school teacher Caelum Quirk and his younger wife, Maureen, a school nurse, move to Littleton, Colorado, they both get jobs at Columbine High School. In April 1999, Caelum returns home to Three Rivers, Connecticut, to be with his aunt who has just had a stroke. But Maureen finds herself in the school library at Columbine, cowering in a cabinet and expecting to be killed, as two vengeful students go on a carefully premeditated, murderous rampage. Miraculously she survives, but at a cost: she is unable to recover from the trauma. Caelum and Maureen flee Colorado and return to an illusion of safety at the Quirk family farm in Three Rivers. But the effects of chaos are not so easily put right, and further tragedy ensues.