Roger Ebert’s home-office “cave” is exactly how one might imagine it: a mecca fit for the ultimate movie aficionado, filled floor to ceiling with books and films. The most prolific film critic of our time, Ebert regularly blogs, tweets to more than half a million followers and since 1967 has written Chicago Sun-Times movie reviews that are syndicated to 200 newspapers around the country and which have earned him a Pulitzer Prize. He’s the author of 17 books, ranging from Scorsese by Ebert to the “Norton Anthology” Roger Ebert’s Book of Film: From Tolstoy to Tarantino, the Finest Writing from a Century of Film, but his latest, which came out September 13, is his personal favorite. It is a first: Ebert on Ebert—a memoir aptly called Life Itself.

While Forbes describes Ebert as “the most powerful pundit in America,” Chicagoans have the official bragging rights: He is our town’s tour de force. Ebert gets more than 100 million visits a year on his website. What he writes—thumbs up or down—matters. He served 33 years as the cohost of At the Movies, Siskel & Ebert and Ebert & Roeper, until postsurgical complications related to thyroid cancer left him unable to speak five years ago. His current show, Roger Ebert Presents At the Movies, is a weekly half-hour film-review program on Chicago’s WTTW, produced by Ebert and his wife, Chaz Hammelsmith-Ebert. Walk inside his office, and the glass door reads simply, THE EBERT COMPANY, LTD., FINE FILM CRITICISM, SINCE 1967. Ebert is his own company—his name alone can make or break a film.

He sits in front of his Mac and his built-in flat-screen TV in an office filled with relics of old films, mementos, photos, toy Studebakers and figurines (three shelves are loaded with Disney characters).

 
  An Emmy stands among other Ebert’s awards and diplomas.  

And then there are the awards: A platoon of statues stand at attention throughout the office’s nooks and crannies. Walls and shelves are filled with honorary doctorates from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Colorado and the American Film Institute, as well as an Honorary Lifetime Membership Award from the Directors Guild of America and an honor by The American Society of Cinematographers, among other prizes of distinction. He is also the first film critic to have received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (in 2005).

This month, Ebert receives another high honor: the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, presented by the Chicago Public Library and Chicago Public Library Foundation. He will be honored on October 20 at a fundraiser at The Forum on the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The Carl Sandburg Literary Award holds personal meaning for Ebert. “Carl Sandburg worked for several years in the ’20s as the film critic of the Chicago Daily News,” he explains. “I wrote an introduction to a book of those reviews and visited his home in Harbert, Michigan.”

If a film buff were to turn the lens on Ebert the man, he or she would not have to go far. The opening pages of Ebert’s memoir describes his relationship to film as simply as the sign on his office door: “I was born inside the movie of my life. The visuals were before me, the audio surrounded me, the plot unfolded inevitably but not necessarily. I don’t remember how I got into the movie, but it continues to entertain me.”

A Further Peek Into the World of Roger Ebert

Early-Morning Reading
Chicago Sun-Times, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, salon.com, slate.com, Google News

What’s On My Mind
The rise of the extremist right wing; politicians who believe in creationism; the organized thefts carried out by Wall Street; the need for financial reform.

Work Rules
You will never finish unless you begin. The muse visits during the act of writing, not before.

Organization Matters
My books are alphabetized by author or subject. Everything else is organized on my computer