Pulitzer Prize General Non Fiction Winner
The Swerve
by Stephen Greenblatt
Summary
The story of the fifteenth-century book hunter Poggio Bracciolini and his rediscovery of Lucretius's lost poem "On the Nature of Things," which Greenblatt argues helped pry open the modern world. He traces how Lucretius's atomist vision of a godless, material universe seeped into Renaissance art, science, and politics. Despite scholarly debate over its sweeping claims, the book reached a wide readership and won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award.
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Historical Context & Significance
Greenblatt won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award for this work, which argues that a single poem changed the course of Western thought.