Stephen Jay Greenblatt is a Pulitzer Prize winning American literary critic, theorist and scholar. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Vermont. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He honors include the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize, for Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley.

He has edited six collections of criticism, is the co-author (with Charles Mee) of a play, Cardenio, and is a founding coeditor of the journal Representations. Also General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eighth Edition, he is the author of nine books, including Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare Hamlet in Purgatory Practicing New Historicism Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture and The Swerve: How the World Became Modern. Yale) is Cogan University Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University.

The copying and translation of this ancient book-the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age-fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius-a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions.

Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. One of the world's most celebrated scholars, Stephen Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it.

Lucretius books