On Monday, D.T. Max, staff writer for The New Yorker, gave the Jesse Floyd Mack Lecture in Hallock Auditorium at the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies. The 90-minute talk focused on Max’s experience writing literary journalism for The New Yorker and included time for attendees of the event to ask questions at the end.

Max has served as a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2010. He is a New York Times bestselling author, as well as a former Guggenheim Fellow and Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. He was invited as the lecturer for this year’s talk by Hal Sundt, senior lecturer of Writing and Communication at Oberlin. 

“Max is, without exaggeration, one of the very best nonfiction writers, not just currently, but ever,” Sundt said. “The opportunity for any young and emerging writers to learn from him and to give insight into not just the perspective of what it’s like writing for The New Yorker … but what it means to make a life as a writer … I can’t think of a better person to give that kind of insight.”

Max has covered a wide range of topics in his time at The New Yorker, including food, culture, medicine, and crime. Sundt explained the wide breadth of focus across Max’s work as a rare skill.

“He’s written a number of profiles, … but he’s also written these phenomenal investigative, reported features, and these entertaining features,” he said. “That’s actually quite unique for someone to not just do all those different things, but to be so excellent at all of those.”

During the talk, Max spoke at length about the process of developing and writing stories for The New Yorker. Focusing mostly on the specificity of literary journalism, Max provided students with advice for connecting with sources and crafting compelling narratives from the facts readily available. During the latter half of the talk, Max identified timeframes as a unique challenge to writing literary journalism, as the arc of a piece’s popularity can be particularly short-lived. He explained that having to wait months for sources to respond to requests for interviews is part of what makes the process of writing so long.

After majoring in comparative literature at Harvard University, Max worked as a book editor in the years after he graduated, and only became invested in reporting after he left his first job. 

“I realized that I knew a lot about publishing and authors, and so I started pitching pieces on [that] to magazines,” Max said. “I immediately liked sitting with people who you could never meet otherwise and interviewing them. I never had that chance before.”

He identified the current economic climate as the main obstacle to students hoping to pursue a career in journalism after graduation. 

“Because [journalism] pays so poorly, it warps toward people who can tough it out for some years, usually with some help from their parents,” Max said. “You want journalists to be diverse. You want everybody to get a shot at it. And that doesn’t work.”

Max, whose daughter is a second-year student at Oberlin, noted that the number of student publications on campus stood out to him, as it is rare for a campus as small as Oberlin to have so many consistently published journals and newspapers. 

“I’ve always had a very high view of Oberlin as a creative institution,” Max said. “These smaller schools, … they do provide something that I think is really quite remarkable.”

College second-year Benjamin Rosielle said that they felt positively about Oberlin’s journalism program and its attempts to provide students with adequate experience. 

“I thought it was interesting to know about [Max’s] career and how he got into [journalism],” Rosielle said. “I feel like we have plenty of great campus newspapers and magazines. I think the people teaching journalism here are very good at what they do.”

Sundt said he hoped students were able to walk away from the talk inspired and encouraged to pursue a future career in journalism. 

“I think learning from someone like D.T. Max … [is] this incredible opportunity to learn about one possible pathway for how they can improve as writers,” Sundt said. “I hope folks leave encouraged as writers and that it demystifies the process of what it means to be a working writer and a successful writer.”