Hyde’s modern classic about the value of creativity – and its importance in a culture increasingly beholden to money and overrun with commodities – is as relevant and necessary today as it was before the Internet and iPods. Hyde explores how “commerce of the creative spirit” functions in the lives of artists, and in the culture as a whole, through the lens of anthropology, literature, economics and psychology. The Guardian (U.K.) described The Gift as “… full of fireworks, fun and enlightenment.”
A MacArthur Fellow and former director of undergraduate creative writing at Harvard University, Hyde teaches during the fall semesters at Kenyon College (Gambier, Ohio), where he is the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing. During the rest of the year he lives in Cambridge, Mass., and is a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
Free and open to the public, the lecture is at 9:30 a.m. at Levitt Auditorium (401 S. Broad St.).
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