The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand
The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America
Date: May 30, 2001 Speaker: Louis Menand
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John Cole, Director of the Center for the Book, introduced Mr. Menand saying that The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, May 2001) focuses on American thought and action between the end of the Civil War and World War I, a period in which the Library of Congress has strong corresponding collections.

Mr. Menand is an editor, journalist, literary critic, and cultural historian. He is the author of a book on T.S. Eliot, Discovering Modernism (Oxford University Press, 1987), and the editor of The Future of Academic Freedom (University of Chicago Press, 1996) and Pragmatism: A Reader (Vintage, 1997). Mr. Menand is the coeditor of America in Theory (Oxford University Press, 1987) and Volume Seven of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

In his book, Mr. Menand emphasizes the development and influence of pragmatism in American Culture by examining the lives, writings and influence of four men: Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, psychologist William James (who popularized the word "pragmatism"), philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce; and John Dewey, who was America's foremost public intellectual for decades.

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