Thinkers

Thinkers is a guided tour through a vast array of great works and the minds behind them, providing the inspiration and enthusiasm that will encourage student readers as well as adult readers to learn to think about thinking and the way the mind works.

In each chapter, author Michael Clay Thompson discusses an author’s work along with the author, providing quotes from the work and valuable insight into the mind behind the creation.

The authors and their works included in the 20 essays are: 


 1. Charles Van Doren, A History of Knowledge 

 2. Sir Kenneth Clarke, Civilisation 

 3. Richard Preston, The Hot Zone 

 4. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time 

 5. George Eliot, Middlemarch 

 6. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Creators 

 7. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels 

 8. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment 

 9. Vasari, The Lives of the Artists 

10. James Burke, The Day the Universe Changed 

11. A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy 

12. Kaye Gibbons, Ellen Foster

13. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter 

14. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 

15. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass 

16. Kate Chopin, The Awakening 

17. Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night 

18. Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World 

19. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar 

20. Frederick Douglass, The Narrative of Frederick Douglass