National Association for Literature Development

First published in America in 1979, "The Gift" is a modern classic which remarkably has never before been published in Britain. This inspiring examination of the 'gift economy' is even more relevant now than when it originally appeared, a brilliantly argued defence of the place of creativity in our increasingly market-orientated society. ""The Gift" actually deserves the hyperbolic praise that in most blurbs is so empty. It is the sort of book that you remember where you were and even what you were wearing when you first picked it up. The sort that you hector friends about until they read it too. This is not just formulaic blurbspeak; it is the truth. No one who is invested in any kind of art, in questions of what real art does and doesn't have to do with money, spirituality, ego, love, ugliness, sales, politics, morality, marketing, and whatever you call 'value', can read "The Gift" and remain unchanged." - David Foster Wallace.

LEWIS HYDE was born in Boston in 1945 and studied at both Minnesota and Iowa Universities. His hugely acclaimed essay, "Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking" in part sprang out of his experiences as an alcoholism counsellor but he is also a highly regarded poet in his own right whose poetry and essays have been widely published. He is a MacArthur Fellow, a former director of creative writing at Harvard and alongside The Gift he is the author of the equally acclaimed Trickster Makes this World. He currently lives in Massachusetts where he is completing a third book.

Lewis Hyde is a poet, essayist, translator, and cultural critic with a particular interest in the public life of the imagination. His 1983 book, The Gift, illuminates and defends the non-commercial portion of artistic practice. Trickster Makes This World (1998) uses a group of ancient myths to argue for the kind of disruptive intelligence all cultures need if they are to remain lively, flexible, and open to change. Hyde is currently at work on a book about our “cultural commons,” that vast store of ideas, inventions, and works of art that we have inherited from the past and continue to produce.

A MacArthur Fellow and former director of undergraduate creative writing at Harvard University, Hyde teaches during the fall semesters at Kenyon College, where he is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing. During the rest of the year he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.