Monday, Feb. 20, the Key West Friends of the Library will welcome distinguished Pulitzer prize winning author Alison Lurie to the podium. Lectures in the series are at the Key West Theater, 512 Eaton St. Admission is free. They begin promptly at 6:00 p.m., but seating begins at 5:30 on a first come first served basis.

Alison Lurie is a novelist, memoirist and writer of non-fiction. She won her Pulitzer for Foreign Affairs for fiction in 1984. Author John Fowles, writing about the book, said: “There is no American writer I have read with more constant pleasure and sympathy. . . Foreign Affairs earns the same shelf as Henry James and Edith Wharton.”

Christopher Isherwood, discussing her sharp-eyed and often devastating assessments of contemporary social mores, said she was “. . . perhaps more shocking than she knows—shocking like Jane Austen.”

Lurie laughs off such comparisons: “I think it’s very nice but a little over the top. One thing I do have in common with these writers is that I’m interested in family relationships and childhood and memory.”

Her novel The Truth About Lauren Jones was set partly in Key West and won the Prix Femina étranger. Lurie has written eleven novels and a book of short stories, as well as several books of children’s folk tales, memoir, and non-fiction. She is the F. J. Whiton Professor of American Literature emerita at Cornell University, where she taught writing, folklore, and literature.

Lurie’s most recent book is Reading for Fun, a collection of essays based on her lectures at Cornell. In it she gives her insight into some of the most brilliant and original American and British fiction of the last hundred years, including work by Henry James, Doris Lessing, John Updike, Mary McCarthy, Anthony Powell, Angela Carter, and Garrison Keillor— some of whom she has known personally. These unusual books combine tragedy and comedy, supernatural events and social criticism, and are fun to read.

Ms. Lurie divides her time between London, Ithaca, NY and Key West. For more information go to http://friendsofthekeywestlibrary.org and click on lecture series.