Richard Harvey

Richard Harvey has been passionate about literature since he was six years old. His mother often read to him from the Bible, and he still remembers the passage that riveted him—it was a vivid description of a powerful horse.

"It all fed me with a potent drug that even now runs in my bloodstream," he said.

Harvey admires Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, and he loves Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, which he calls "a work of massive proportions, massive thought, so far above the mean and tiny register it has received from modern adaptation."

He enjoys teaching in the Seniors Program because, he said, in each class he has taught, "each individual has shown so much life force; each has come from a unique pattern of living; all show so much willingness to resume again and again the task of absorbing and expressing our common destiny as learners and celebrants of life."