The Creators

The companion volume to The Discoverers and The Seekers, this is Boorstin's panoramic, yet minutely detailed history of the arts. Even as he tells the stories of Homer, Joyce, Giotto, Picasso, Handel, Wagner, and Virginia Woolf, Boorstin assembles them into a grand mosaic that encompasses three thousand years 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 Creators is a historical tour de force, a synthesis of the cultural and artistic history of the West within the context of three thousand years of humanity's achievements in the realm of religion, philosophy, literature and art.  An awesome work of scholarship."
--Vartan Gregorian

"The scope of this work is as broad as history itself, leading with some beguiling detours to the modern era...a book that distills the best of human achievement into human terms."
--The Wall Street Journal

"There are few writers who could tackle so vast a subject with as much verve or self-assurance or infectious enthusiasm as Boorstin...He combines lively opinions and a distinguished  historian's  erudition, with a first-class journalist's clarity and eye for the revealing anecdote...Irresistible."
--USA Today