Lewis Hyde’s landmark cultural criticism celebrates the public life of the imagination. His grandly influential 1983 book, The Gift, illuminates and defends artistic practices that lie beyond the market. Trickster Makes this World (1998) argues for disruptive figures as the primary catalyst of lively and fearless cultures. His most recent book, Common as Air, outlines the unquantifiable value of the “cultural commons,” which is increasingly threatened by the privatization of knowledge. A MacArthur Fellow and former director of creative writing at Harvard, Hyde is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College.
Lewis Hyde photographed by Reuben Cox
