Most people don't think of a trip to pick up some pizza as a life-altering journey. But if they talked to Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist and cultural critic Henry Allen, they might just change their minds.

At age 15, Allen was out with friends in Madison, Conn. "We were going out to buy some pizza and bring it back," Allen said. "It was twilight. There were seagulls flying. It was quite beautiful."

This experience inspired Allen to write.

"I decided to describe this and what it felt like. When I finished, I was absolutely enthralled with this piece of literature, which I created. I got hooked," Allen said.

Hooked he was -- since then, Allen, now 61, has written a number of different works, including essays, commentaries, reviews, poetry and a novel. In 2000, Allen received a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in photography.

For Allen, writing constitutes many things.

"What's real and what's not real," he said. "And what things feel like and what things mean. That's what I do for a living. That's criticism, that's features, that's a novel I wrote."

Allen will be reading portions of his work at 8 p.m. tonight at the Foster Auditorium in Pattee Library, as a part of the ongoing Allegheny Mountains Reading Series. The event is sponsored by the English department's Master of Fine Arts program.

Gabriel Welsch, an organizer of the event, said Allen is a great choice for the series.

"Given the critical eye that he has, as well as the fact that he is recognized to be among the leading cultural critics, I think he's an excellent choice," Welsch said.

This literary fame did not come to Allen overnight. He started writing short stories in college but could never finish them. After college, Allen joined the Marine Corps and went to Vietnam, where he continued to have trouble completing his stories.

After he returned from Vietnam, Allen turned to journalism and began working at the New Haven Register in the mid-1960s. He then moved onto the New York Daily News and Esquire.

"If you're ever going to get any stories finished, you better go some place where you have to finish them," he said.

By 1970, however, Allen had yet to find his "niche".

"I was broke. I needed money to fix my car. Esquire [had] mutated, changed, [and] became less interesting," he said.

But things changed when Allen was offered a job as a copy editor for the Style section of the Washington Post.

"It was a fabulous and inventive place. It's a place that lets you grow and appreciates idiosyncrasy," he said, discussing the Style section's openness to different forms of writing.

"What else could I want? Any style of writing that got the story told, you could use," he said.

While working for the Washington Post, Allen has also written for the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and Vogue.

More than 30 years later, Allen, who lives with his wife in Tacoma Park, Md., continues to work as an editor for the Washington Post's Style section.

"I've wondered how long I can last, but it's been going well for over 30 years now," he said. "It just seems to be a good fit. I have a niche here."