Michael Silverblatt, a ravenous reader and cerebral interviewer whose long-running public radio program, “Bookworm,” provoked authors to see their work in fresh ways and to articulate what drove them to write in the first place, died on Feb. 14 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 73.

Mr. Silverblatt, whose nationally syndicated show aired from 1989 to 2022, once described himself as “a person of ferocious compassion instead of ferocious intellect.” He stunned his guests not only by having thoroughly digested their latest books, but also by having devoured most of their entire output. “He was the reader most writers dream about,” said Joyce Carol Oates.

“There are all sorts of other things that you can get on radio and television,” he told Oprah.com in 2009, “but I wanted listeners of ‘Bookworm’ to hear words, ideas, but partricularly emotions that don’t get discussed in public, if at all elsewhere. That is to say, for one reason or another, the show is a crusade that’s much larger than the subject of books.”