The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination [Paperback]

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 hisDiscoverersa 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. The capston to one of the greatest careers in the history of American intellectual endeavor.  WithThe 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 TodayDaniel J. Boorstinwas the author ofThe Americans, a trilogy (The Colonial Experience;The National Experience, andThe 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.US