The Athenaeum of Philadelphia just posted its photos from the award ceremony May 4 for its annual literary awards. Here’s me, actually in a suit and tie (Southwestern audiences will be stunned to know I own such things) accepting the award from committee chairman (and author) Cordelia Frances Biddle, for Appetite for America, which she very kindly praised in a Philadelphia Inquirer piece on the award as “really mythic in scope. It tells the story of the changing culture of the West and of America.”

It was a really wonderful, warm night, and just an incredible honor to win an award that goes back to 1950 and has been given to Chaim Potok, Loren Eisley, Edmund Bacon, Digby Baltzell, David Bradley, one of the great early phillymag writers, Kristen Hunter, and then a bunch of writers I grew up with in town, Steve Lopez, Camille Paglia, Ben Yagoda, John Paulos, Jonathan Weiner, Paul Fussel, Diane McKinney-Whetstone and many others. I’m humbled and amazed to see my name on such a list.

The caterers, who were terrific, actually made two Fred Harvey dishes from the recipe appendix of the book, sour milk biscuits and mini-blueberry muffins. Highly yummy.

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