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CORVALLIS - A well-known essayist who has written extensively on the "browning of America" will discuss notions of race and identity in a free public lecture on Thursday, Nov. 6, at Oregon State University.

The lecture by Richard Rodriguez, "The Browning of America: Race, Religion and Ethnicity in an Erotic Age," begins at 4 p.m. in Pharmacy Hall Room 305. Part of the Horning Lecture Series at OSU, the talk is free and open to the public.

Rodriguez appeared as an essayist for more than 10 years on the PBS show, "The News Hour with Jim Lehrer" and his televised essays on American life garnered him a Peabody Award.

The son of Mexican immigrants, Rodriguez grew up in Sacramento, Calif., and went on to graduate from Stanford University. He later studied religion at Columbia University, English Renaissance literature at the Warburg Institute in London, and enrolled as a doctoral candidate at the University of California-Berkeley.

In 1982, he published an autobiography called "Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez," which was alternately praised and criticized for its skepticism about the effectiveness of bilingual education and affirmative action.

Ten years later, Rodriguez published "Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father," which he called a philosophical travel book. It was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in 1993.

His latest book, written in 2002, is called "Brown: The Last Discovery of America." Rodriguez says the browning of America is inevitable. He writes: "Hispanics are browning an America that has traditionally chosen to describe itself as black and white. I write about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America."

The 2003-04 Horning Lecture series focuses on "Race, Ethnicity and National Identity."