The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

by Daniel J. Boorstin

Overview

By piecing the lives of selected individuals into a grand mosaic, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Daniel J. Boorstin explores the development of artistic innovation over 3,000 years. A hugely ambitious chronicle of the arts that Boorstin delivers with the scope that made his Discoverers a national bestseller.
  Even as he tells the stories of such individual creators as Homer, Joyce, Giotto, Picasso, Handel, Wagner, and Virginia Woolf, Boorstin assembles them into a grand mosaic of aesthetic and intellectual invention.  In the process he tells us not only how great art (and great architecture and philosophy) is created, but where it comes from and how it has shaped and mirrored societies from Vedic India to the twentieth-century United States.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679743750
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/28/1993
Series:	Knowledge Series , #1
Edition description:	1st Vintage Books Edition
Pages:	832
Sales rank:	364,088
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.80(d)

About the Author

Daniel J. Boorstin was the author of The Americans, a trilogy (The Colonial Experience; The National Experience, and The Democratic Experience) that won the Francis Parkman Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1989, he received the National Book Award for lifetime contribution to literature. He was the director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, and for twelve years served as the Librarian of Congress. He died in 2004.

Editorial Reviews

"The capston to one of the greatest careers in the history of American intellectual endeavor.  With The Creators, Boorstin enters the ranks of the 'heroes of the imagination.'" —George F. Will

"A remarkable achievement an a pleasure to read." —The New York Times Book Review

"There are few writers who could tackle so vast a subject with as much verve or self-assurance or infectious enthusiam as Boorstin. . . . He combines lively opinion a distinguished historian's erudition, with a first-class journalist's clarity and eye for the revealing anecdote . . . irresitible." —USA Today

From the Publisher

Boorstin's companion volume to The Discoverers --a one-week PW bestseller and a BOMC main selection in cloth--chronicles 3000 years of artistic invention, while providing entertaining biographical profiles of Dante, Leonardo, Goethe, Ben Franklin, Picasso and dozens more. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

While the ultimate subject of former Librarian of Congress Boorstin's encore to his best seller The Discoverers ( LJ 11/15/83) is the culture of the ``literate West,'' the great episodes/great persons theme justifies the grandiose subtitle. In this work of breadth and uncontested erudition, readers will almost assuredly find a topic or two outside their ken but invested here with vivid clarity. Most of the chapters are actually self-contained essays, many tours de force, but while these stories display a certain connectedness, there is little of the continuity and change that characterizes historical discourse. Boorstin's heroes include obvious choices but also baffling selections, e.g., Jacob Burckhardt, the man who defined the Renaissance in modern times. Women, specifically Virginia Woolf, are relegated to a single chapter of their own. He generally ignores ``low'' entertainment except when posterity has awarded it the imprimatur of high culture. Ironically, his account suggests the artist's quest for freedom in this world is a Western axiom, despite the McCarthy legacy. This is a very long but completely engrossing book that academic and public libraries must acquire.-- Scott H. Silver man, Bryn Mawr Coll. Lib., Pa.

Library Journal