Lewis Lapham is to deliver a lecture on celebrities in contemporary culture at the ROM on Tuesday. (Lavin Agency)

Lewis Lapham, former editor of Harper's Magazine and now editor of Lapham's Quarterly, is to speak in Toronto next Tuesday about celebrity culture.

He is to deliver the annual Eva Holtby Lecture on contemporary culture, named after Royal Ontario Museum benefactor.

Lapham, one of the most erudite and skilfully satirical writers in the United States, will compare today's celebrity culture with the way the ancients worshipped gods, an idea he explored in his book The Wish for Kings.

"The wish for kings is an old and familiar wish, as well-known in medieval Europe as in ancient Mesopotamia," Lapham wrote in the 1993 book.

"The ancient Greeks assigned trace elements of the divine to trees and winds and stones. A river god sulks, and the child drowns; a sky god smiles, and the corn ripens. The modern Americans assign similar powers not only to whales and spotted owls but also to individuals blessed with the aura of celebrity."

Lapham, who is also author of Money and Class in America and Pretensions to Empire, plans to pull in other threads for his lecture, including the thinking of Canadian guru Marshall McLuhan.

The lecture will be followed by a panel, hosted by ROM CEO William Thorsell and including journalist Sarah Hampson, writer-director Don McKellar and Murray Pomerance, a media studies professor at Ryerson University.

The lecture is at 7 p.m. on Oct. 27 at the ROM.