Tuesdays with Morrie
Mitch Albom (1997)
“A dying professor's final lessons teach his former student everything college never could.”
At a Glance
Sportswriter Mitch Albom reconnects with his dying college professor, Morrie Schwartz, after seeing him on a Nightline interview. Every Tuesday for fourteen weeks, Mitch visits Morrie at his home in West Newton, Massachusetts, where the old sociology professor — now withering from ALS — delivers informal lectures on the meaning of life, love, death, family, aging, forgiveness, and culture. Morrie dies on a Saturday in November 1995. The book that emerged from those visits became one of the best-selling memoirs in American history.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Published by Doubleday in 1997 after multiple rejections, the book spent 205 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and has sold over 17 million copies worldwide. It was adapted into a 1999 TV film starring Jack Lemmon and Hank Azaria, and has been adapted for stage in multiple countries. It essentially created the modern 'death memoir' genre and established the template that The Last Lecture, When Breath Becomes Air, and dozens of other works would follow.
Diction Profile
Deliberately informal — journalistic prose mixed with conversational speech, almost no academic vocabulary despite the academic setting
Low