Lewis Hyde | |
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| Born | 1945 |
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| Known for | The Gift Trickster Makes this World Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership |
| Website | www.lewishyde.com |
Lewis Hyde (born 1945) is a scholar, essayist, translator, cultural critic and writer whose scholarly work focuses on the nature of imagination, creativity, and property.
Hyde was born in Cambridge, MA. He is the son of Elizabeth Sanford Hyde and Walter Lewis Hyde. He received an M.A. in comparative literature from the University of Iowa and a B.A. in sociology from the University of Minnesota after which there were many years of freelance work and odd jobs, before teaching writing in the 80s.
Hyde taught writing at Harvard University (1983–1989); in his last year there, he directed the undergraduate writing program. From 1989 to 2001 he was the Luce Professor of Arts and Politics at Kenyon College in Ohio. Beginning in 2006 he served as the Richard L. Thomas Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon, and a visiting fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center. He is also a Nonresident Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center for Communication. He has since retired.
Hyde's popular works of scholarship, including the books The Gift (1983) and Trickster Makes this World (1998), have been widely praised by writers of fiction, including Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem and David Foster Wallace.[1][2] The Gift has also been cited as the inspiration for visual artist Jim Mott's Itinerant Artist Project. Robert Darnton in The New York Times called Hyde's book, Common as Air: Revolution, Art and Ownership (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010), "an eloquent and erudite plea for protecting our cultural patrimony from appropriation by commercial interests."[3] His latest book is A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2019).
Hyde's awards include an NEH Fellowship for Independent Study and Research (1979); three NEA Creative Writing Fellowships (1977, 1982, 1987); a MacArthur Fellowship (often called "the MacArthur genius grant") (1991); a residency at the Getty Center, Los Angeles (1993–94); an "Osher Fellow" at the Exploratorium in San Francisco (1998);[4] a Lannan Literary Fellowship (2002); an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (2003); a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (2006), and multiple MacDowell Colony Fellowships (1988, 1991, 1993, 1996, 1999, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2012, and 2018).
Hyde is married to Patricia Vigderman. The couple divide their time between Gambier, OH and Cambridge.
