The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World (Canons) - Softcover

LEWIS HYDE was born in Boston in 1945 and studied at both Minnesota and Iowa Universities. His hugely acclaimed essay, "Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking" in part sprang out of his experiences as an alcoholism counsellor but he is also a highly regarded poet in his own right whose poetry and essays have been widely published. He is a MacArthur Fellow, a former director of creative writing at Harvard and alongside The Gift he is the author of the equally acclaimed Trickster Makes this World. He currently lives in Massachusetts where he is completing a third book.

"Brilliant... by the time he is done he has folded language, culture and the very habit of being human into his ken." New Yorker "A masterpiece... The Gift is the best book I know of for the aspiring young, for talented but unacknowledged creators, or even for those who have achieved material success and are worried that this means they've sold out." Margaret Atwood "This timely British reissue reminds readers how urgent some of these questions remain, while also allowing them to measure the extent to which matters have changed." Bharat Tandon, TLS "Persuasive and fascinatingly illustrated, The Gift profits immensely from the modesty and unpretentiousness of Hyde's writing and the fascinated good nature with which he expounds his propositions." Tim Martin, Independent on Sunday "The Gift actually deserves the hyperbolic praise that in most blurbs is so empty. It is the sort of book that you remember where you were and even what you were wearing when you first picked it up. The sort that you hector friends about until they read it too. This is not just formulaic blurbspeak; it is the truth. No one who is invested in any kind of art, in questions of what real art does and doesn't have to do with money, spirituality, ego, love, ugliness, sales, politics, morality, marketing, and whatever you call 'value', can read The Gift and remain unchanged." David Foster Wallace"