About Us
About Us
“Radio Proust” is a project of the Bard Center. Bard College, the sponsoring institution, is a small liberal arts college with about 2,000 students, founded in 1860, located in the Hudson Valley, 90 miles north of New York City.
“Radio Proust” was created by journalist and educator Larry Bensky in 2007. It is designed to explore many aspects of the life and works of French author Marcel Proust (1871-1922). (A good, brief
biography.)
“Radio Proust” welcomes questions, comments and suggestions via e-mail:
proust@bard.edu.
Larry Bensky
Larry Bensky is Executive Producer and Host of
Radio Proust, a project of the Bard College Center. His interest in French and European culture began during his undergraduate years at Yale, where he studied with Henri Peyre. After graduation, he worked on books by Isak Dinesen, André Malraux, Italo Calvino and other noted European authors in the editorial department of Random House in New York. He then moved to Paris, where he was Paris editor of
The Paris Review, which published his widely anthologized interview with Harold Pinter. While in Paris, he read all of Proust’s
À la recherche du temps perdu, and attended classes on French writers at the Sorbonne. He returned to New York as an editor at
The New York Times Book Review, specializing in assigning and editing reviews of European writers. For the past forty years he has lived in San Francisco and Berkeley, California, where he moved in 1968 to be managing editor of
Ramparts magazine. He has had an extensive career in broadcasting since moving to California, including work as National Affairs Correspondent for Pacifica Radio, where he won a George Polk award for his broadcasts of the Iran-Contra Hearings in 1987. As a college teacher, he has been on the faculty of the Communications Department at Stanford, and the Communication and Political Science Departments at California State University East Bay, where he retired after seventeen years in 2009. He has also taught Mass Media and Literary Criticism courses at Berkeley City College, and now teaches a course in “Proust and His World” for the Osher Lifetime Learning Institute at the University of California, Berkeley.
