The First Biography of John Williams
In John Williams: A Composer's Life, the first biography of the renowned film composer, author Tim Greiving offers an engaging account of a man whose body of work is well-known but whose personal life has consistently remained very private.
Williams wrote the memorable scores and hummable themes for a staggering number of popular touchstones across multiple generations–among them Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Jaws, E.T., Jurassic Park, Schindler's List, and the Harry Potter series–and earned more Oscar nominations than any individual artist in the history of the motion picture Academy.
With unprecedented access to the famously private artist, Greiving attempted to plumb the depths of both the music and the man. Come hear him share some of stories behind the scores and reveal new insights about this mysterious wizard of cinema, in a conversation moderated by Seattle's own author and film critic, Jeffrey Overstreet.
Tim Greiving
Tim Greiving is an arts journalist and historian in Los Angeles who specializes in film music. He is the author of John Williams: A Composer's Life, the first biography of the renowned film composer. He regularly writes for the Los Angeles Times and has contributed to NPR, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Criterion, and many other outlets. He has written program notes for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Royal Albert Hall, and liner notes for more than a hundred soundtrack albums.
Jeffrey Overstreet
Jeffrey Overstreet is the author of two memoirs about cinema and faith—Through a Screen Darkly (2007) and Lost and Found in the Cathedral of Cinema (2026)—as well as the fantasy novel Auralia's Colors (2007) and its three sequels. He is an associate professor of creative writing and film at Seattle Pacific University, where students voted him Undergraduate Professor of the Year in 2024. Overstreet formerly served as senior film critic at Christianity Today, and his writing on art, faith, and culture has been published at Image, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Paste, and Comment, and in many other journals. He lives in Shoreline, Washington.
