'Lewis Hyde's second masterpiece.' Margaret Atwood

'Hyde is one of our true superstars of non-fiction - this book not only covers its subject in more depth and comprehension than anything before (anything I've read, anyway) but it also ends up being about ...well, everything. The guy's both brilliant (intellectually, literarily) and wise (psychologically, spiritually, you-name-itally).' -- David Foster Wallace

'Dazzling ... rewards repeated reading.' -- Michael Chabon

'A masterpiece ... The thrilling thing about reading non-fiction such as Hyde's is not just that it gives you new thoughts: it also changes the way you think.'-- Scotland on Sunday

'[Hyde] is one of those quirky, eccentric Wise Children the United States sometimes throws up-a sort of Thoreau-cum-anthropologist-cum-seer...[Trickster] should be read by anyone interested in the grand and squalid matter of all things human...A glorious grab-bag stuffed with necessary loot, a joyful plum pudding rich in treasures.' -- Margaret Atwood Los Angeles Times

'Brilliant...By the time he is done he has folded language, culture, and the very habit of being human into his ken.' The New Yorker 

Lewis Hyde was born in Boston and studied at the Universities of Minnesota and Iowa. In addition to Trickster Makes This World, he is the author of The Gift, a defence of the importance of creativity in our increasingly money-orientated society. Editor of On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg and The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau, Hyde is now writing a defence of the 'cultural commons', that vast store of ideas and art we have inherited from the past. A MacArthur Fellow and former Director of Creative Writing at Harvard, Hyde is currently the Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College in Ohio.