From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Louis Menand (born January 21, 1952) is a
prominent American writer and academic, best known
for his book The Metaphysical Club (2001), an intellectual
and cultural history of late 19th and early 20th century
America.
Life and
career
Background and education
Menand was born in Syracuse, New York, and raised
around Boston,
Massachusetts. His mother was a historian, who wrote a biography of Samuel Adams. Menand's father, Louis
Menand III, taught political science at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
A graduate of Pomona College, Menand attended Harvard Law
School for one year (1973-1974) before he received his Ph.D. from Columbia
University in 1980.
Print and
the Academy
Menand thereafter taught at Princeton University and held
staff positions at The New Republic and The New
Yorker. He served as Distinguished Professor of English at
the Graduate Center of the City University of New York
before accepting a post at Harvard in 2003.
Menand published his first book, Discovering Modernism: T.
S. Eliot and His Context, in 1987. His long-anticipated second
book, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America,
includes detailed biographical material on Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.,
William James,
Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey. It received
the Pulitzer Prize for History,
the 2002 Francis Parkman Prize, and The
Heartland Prize for Non-Fiction. In 2002, Menand published
American Studies, a collection of essays on prominent
figures in American culture.
Menand is the Robert M. and Anne T. Bass Professor of English
and American Literature and Language at Harvard
University. His principal field of academic interest is 19th
and 20th century American cultural history. He contributes to
The New
Yorker, for which he remains a staff writer, and The New York Review of
Books, among other publications.
Books
- Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and his Context,
1987, New York: Oxford University Press
- The Future of Academic Freedom, (editor), 1996,
Chicago: U of Chicago Press
- Pragmatism: A Reader, (editor), 1997, New York:
Vintage
- The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America,
2001, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, ISBN 0-374-19963-9
(hardcover), ISBN 0-374-52849-7 (paperback)
- American Studies, 2002, New York: Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux, ISBN 0-374-10434-4 (hardcover)
See also
External
links
Interviews
Wikis
Quiz
Map
Search