Out of Nothing, Everything

Larry Harvey (1948-2018) was the founder of Burning Man, the celebrated and celebratory cultural movement that started as a spontaneous happening on a San Francisco beach in 1986. It has now grown into an annual pop-up city of 70,000 in the Nevada desert, and a year-round community of creative collaborators and passionate volunteers on six continents. Starting in October of 2013, writer and monologist Jeff Greenwald conducted a series of interviews with Larry. Greenwald, the best-selling author of works including Shopping for Buddhas and The Size of the World, originally pitched the project as a feature-length interview piece for The Sun. His editors sent him back for another round of interviews in 2014, but ultimately decided not to publish the piece. Jeff later gifted this manuscript of these and further 2015 interviews with Larry to Burning Man Project, the nonprofit organization that was established by Larry and his co-founders to operate the Nevada event and support the ongoing growth and extension of the culture.