SOURCE: "How Keynes Came to America," in Essays on John Maynard Keynes, edited by Milo Keynes, Cambridge University Press, 1975, pp. 132-41.

In the following essay, which was first published in 1971, Galbraith explains how the ideas contained in the General Theory were disseminated and eventually adopted in the United States.

'I believe myself to be writing a book on economic theory which will largely revolutionize—not, I suppose, at once but in the course of the next ten years—the way the world thinks about economic problems.'

—Letter from J. M. Keynes to George
Bernard Shaw, New Year's Day 1935.

The most influential book on economic and social policy so far in this century, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, by John Maynard Keynes, was published in 1936 in Britain and a few weeks later in the United States. A paperback edition is available in the United States...