Lewis Hyde

Lewis Hyde

Photo Credit: Kenyon College

Lewis Hyde was born in Boston and studied at the Universities of Minnesota and Iowa. In addition to The Gift, he is the author of Trickster Makes this World, a portrait of the kind of disruptive imagination that all cultures need if they are to remain lively and open to change. Editor of On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg and The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau, Hyde’s most recent book is Common as Air, a stirring defence of our cultural commons, that vast store of art and ideas we have inherited from the past and continue to enrich in the present.

A MacArthur Fellow and former Director of Creative Writing at Harvard, Hyde is currently the Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College in Ohio.



The passage into mystery always refreshes. If, when we work, we can look once a day upon the face of mystery, then our labor satisfies. We are lightened when our gifts rise from pools we cannot fathom

The Gift

Lewis Hyde

Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox… A boundary-crosser

Trickster Makes This World

Lewis Hyde

Memory and forgetting: these are the faculties of mind by which we are aware of time, and time is a mystery

A Primer for Forgetting