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 The 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 has recently published Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership, a book about "cultural commons," that vast, unowned store of ideas, inventions, and art that we have inherited from the past.

Education

M.A. The University of Iowa
B.A. The University of Minnesota

Selected Publications

Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership. Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2010.

Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1998.

This Error is the Sign of Love. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1988.

The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. New York: Random House, 1983.

Courses Taught

English 202 Nonfiction Prose Writing Workshop
English 271 The Confidence Game in America
INDS 375 American Nature Writing