MIT World Speakers

Lewis Hyde

Lewis Hyde's interests center on the public life of the imagination. His 1983 book, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, is an inquiry into the situation of creative artists in a commercial society. Trickster Makes This World (1998) is a portrait of the the kind of disruptive imagination needed to keep any culture flexible and alive.

Hyde has also published a book of poems, This Error is the Sign of Love, and edited a number of volumes, including he Essays of Henry D. Thoreau, a book of responses to the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, and selected poems of the Nobel Prize-winning Spaniard, Vicente Aleixandre.

Hyde received an M.A. from the University of Iowa and a B.A. from the University of Minnesota.