Michael Philip Silverblatt (August 6, 1952 – February 14, 2026)

Michael Silverblatt, courtesy KCRW.

Michael Philip Silverblatt, the literary broadcaster whose name became synonymous with the deepest and most devoted kind of reading, died on February 14, 2026, at his Los Angeles home. He was 73. His death came after struggling with various health challenges in recent years. He is survived by his sister, Joan Silverblatt Bykofsky.

Born into a Jewish family in New York City on August 6, 1952, Silverblatt attended SUNY Buffalo, where he majored in English, then entered postgraduate studies at Johns Hopkins University before dropping out. He often credited Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with sparking his love of literature. He eventually made his way to Los Angeles, intending to become a screenwriter—a dream that would be redirected by a single dinner party conversation.

Ruth Seymour, the longtime head of KCRW, had just returned from Russia and found herself at a gathering where everyone else was discussing Hollywood. She and Silverblatt fell into a deep discussion of Russian poetry, and the rest of the world, as she later recalled, simply vanished. Afterward, she turned to him and asked, “Have you ever thought about doing radio?” What followed was one of American public broadcasting’s most remarkable careers.

From 1989 to 2022, Silverblatt hosted Bookworm, a nationally syndicated radio program on KCRW focusing on books and literature. Over more than three decades, he recorded over 1,600 interviews with authors and other literary figures, including Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, David Foster Wallace, W. G. Sebald, and John Ashbery.

What set Silverblatt apart was not just his encyclopedic knowledge but the way he wielded it in service of genuine conversation. He described his preparation as “infinite,” familiarizing himself not only with the book an author was promoting but also with their entire body of work. He did not see himself as an interviewer—”Interviewers are supposed to be neutral and faceless, and I don’t believe in that”—but as “first and foremost a reader and a conversationalist.”

The results were often extraordinary. In a now-legendary 1996 exchange, Silverblatt suggested to David Foster Wallace that Infinite Jest had been structured like fractals. Wallace was stunned—it was exactly right. Wallace confirmed it was structured like something called the Sierpinski gasket and remarked that he had heard Silverblatt was an acute reader. That moment became emblematic of what Bookworm represented: a space where literature was treated with the full seriousness it deserved.

The tributes from the literary world reflected the magnitude of his influence. Joyce Carol Oates called him “the very Mozart of literary interviewers.” Norman Mailer named him “the best reader in America.” Susan Sontag declared him “a national treasure.”

Silverblatt described his mission in sweeping terms: “I wanted listeners of Bookworm to hear words and ideas, but particularly emotions that don’t get discussed in public, if at all, elsewhere. The show is a crusade that’s much larger than the subject of books.”

In 2018, Silverblatt was the inaugural recipient of the Deborah Pease Prize, awarded by A Public Space magazine for being a “figure who has advanced the art of literature.” In 2023, The Song Cave published Bookworm: Conversations with Michael Silverblatt, a selection of notable interviews.

His longtime editor Alan Howard said, “Michael was a genius. He could be mesmerizing and always, always, always brilliant. It’s an extraordinary archive that exists, and I don’t think anyone else has ever created such an archive of intelligent, interesting people being asked about their work.”

Michael Silverblatt leaves behind over 1,600 conversations—a cathedral built entirely of words and the singular voice that drew them forth.

Michael Philip Silverblatt (August 6, 1952 – February 14, 2026)

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