The Free World

'The Free World sparkles. Fully original, beautifully written' New York Times 'Like a great novelist, he creates a world' Fintan O'Toole, The New York Review of Books 'Elegantly written, entertaining and bursting with information . . . [Menand] has undertaken what few writers of intellectual history would dare to do' Marjorie Perloff, The Times Literary Supplement 'Louis Menand's The Free World is at once an astonishing work of history and criticism and an essential road map to the middle decades of the twentieth century, from Sartre, Trilling, and Mailer to Sontag, Rauschenberg, and Baldwin. Every page is bracing; the whole amounts to an epic. In a landmark study of a time when art and ideas mattered, Menand's very act of interpretation, the book itself, shows why they still do' Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States 'This sweeping intellectual and cultural history resembles one of those vast Renaissance paintings that lets you see simultaneously both the curvature of the earth and the buttons on the soldiers' uniforms. Louis Menand's cast of characters and range of interests are enormous, from Allen Ginsberg to Zbigniew Brzezinski, from Hannah Arendt's affair with Martin Heidegger to Elvis Presley's Hound Dog. But coursing through this vast panorama is a sustained reflection on the hidden relation between global politics and the life of the mind' Stephen Greenblatt, author of Tyrant and The Swerve: How the World Became Modern 'What do Richard Wright, Betty Friedan, and Elvis Presley have in common? They are all pieces in the giant puzzle masterfully assembled by Louis Menand in this magnum opus. The result is a dazzling panorama of the Cold War but also a captivating case study in Menand's great subject: how art and ideas matter in the world. A thinking person's page-turner' Martin Puchner, author of The Written World and The Language of Thieves