A witty history of an unlikely literary fad and an American pop culture phenomenon of the 1950s and early 1960s examines the overwhelming popularity of the Great Books of Western Civilization and how and why they rose to and fell out of fashion.
Alex Beam is an award-winning columnist for the Boston Globe. His writing has also appeared in the Atlantic, Slate, the New York Times and many other magazines. The author of Gracefully Insane: Life and Death Inside America's Premier Mental Hospital, and of two novels, he lives in Boston.