The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World » (Anniversary Edition)

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 counselor, 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 lives in Ohio, where he is completing a third book.

By now a modern classic, The Gift is a brilliantly orchestrated defense of the value of creativity and of its importance in a culture increasingly governed by money and overrun with commodities. Widely available again after twenty-five years, this book is even more necessary today than when it first appeared. An illuminating and transformative book, and completely original in its view of the world, The Gift is cherished by artists, writers, musicians, and thinkers. It is in itself a gift to all who discover the classic wisdom found in its pages.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Twenty-five years ago, the writer Lewis Hyde met with his editor, Jonathan Galassi, who asked him to define the audience for his groundbreaking work on creativity and society, The Gift. After discarding his reflexive response --"all thinking humans" -- as too grandiose, Hyde replied "poets." Then, as now, poets had a difficult enough time creating an audience for their own work, much less serving as the primary audience for someone else's work of nonfiction. It seems, therefore, a minor miracle of publishing that the work not only made it into print but has quietly found its way to classic status, as evidenced by the recently released 25th anniversary edition.

Preface     xi
Introduction     xv
A Theory of Gifts
Some Food We Could Not Eat     3
The Bones of the Dead     32
The Labor of Gratitude     51
The Bond     72
The Gift Community     96
A Female Property     121
Usury: A History of Gift Exchange     142
Two Experiments in Gift Aesthetics
The Commerce of the Creative Spirit     185
A Draft of Whitman     208
Ezra Pound and the Fate of Vegetable Money     282
Conclusion     356
On Being Good Ancestors     369
Bibliography     387
Notes     393
Acknowledgments     417
Index     419