Art for Life’s Sake: Craft and the Quest for Wholeness in American Culture

Jackson Lears is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University and Editor in Chief of Raritan: A Quarterly Review. He is the author of No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920, which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, and Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award. He is also the author of Something for Nothing: Luck in America and of Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920. Among other topics, he has written on cultural hegemony in the American Historical Review, on modern art and advertising in American Quarterly, and on memory and power in the Journal of American History; he has also co-edited two collections of essays, The Culture of Consumption and The Power of Culture. Lears has held fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Winterthur Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton University, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. He received the Public Humanities Award (for “making ideas current”) from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, and in 2009 was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been a regular contributor to The New Republic, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times, The London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books, among other publications. He is now at work on a book to be published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, with the working title The Wild Card: Animal Spirits and American Modernity.