The Reading Hour

Host Andrew Osborn reads aloud from novels, stories, essays, and poems in the public domain—works of literary accomplishment published before 1930. Most episodes include parts of at least one long work read serially over a number of weeks; recent examples include Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Henry David Thoreau's The Maine Woods, and Sarah Orne Jewett's A Country Doctor. A professor of literature and poetry-journal editor, Osborn sometimes offers interpretive commentary on what he voices, but the focus is always on sharing the language of great writers. Welcome!