The Author (Lewis Hyde)

Lewis Hyde is an independent scholar, poet, translator, and essayist. His work focuses primarily on creativity, property, and imagination. He was born in Boston, MA, received a B.A. in sociology from the University of Minnesota, and earned an M.A. in comparative literature from the University of Iowa. Hyde worked a variety of odd and freelance jobs prior to teaching writing at Harvard University from 1983 to 1989 and Kenyon College from 1989 to 2001. He currently resides in Cambridge, MA where he serves as an associate at the Mahindra Humanities Center and continues to pursue independent scholarly writing and research.

Marcel Mauss

Marcel Mauss was a twentieth century sociologist and anthropologist and a pioneer in the subfield of gift exchange theory. He was the nephew of the noted French sociologist Emile Durkheim and exerted a tremendous amount of influence upon Claude Levi-Strauss, the founder of structural...