The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination [Hardcover]

Daniel J. Boorstin (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0394543955 | ISBN-13: 978-0394543956 | Publication Date: September 8, 1992 | Edition: 1st

By piecing the lives of selected individuals into a grand mosaic, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Daniel J. Boorstin explores the development of artistic innovation over 3,000 years. A hugely ambitious chronicle of the arts that Boorstin delivers with the scope that made his Discoverers a national bestseller.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Historian Daniel J. Boorstin brings his customary depth and range to this compelling book on Western art, taking on everything from European megaliths (Stonehenge, for example) to Benjamin Franklin's autobiography ("the first American addition to world literature"). Boorstin does not aim at being comprehensive--he much prefers to linger over certain "heroes of the imagination" as he surveys human accomplishment in the fields of architecture, music, painting, sculpting, and writing--yet The Creators certainly feels comprehensive, as Boorstin carefully places everything he describes within a grand tradition of aesthetic achievement.

Boorstin knows that good history demands good writing, and his prose makes this big book easy to absorb. "This is a story," he writes, "of how creators in all the arts have enlarged, embellished, fantasized, and filigreed our experience"--an apt description of the role art plays in our life and an equally apt description of the way Boorstin interprets it for readers. (The Creators also is the second volume of a trilogy that starts with The Discoverers and concludes with The Seekers, although none of these books requires any knowledge of the others.) --John J. Miller --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

In an ambitious companion volume to The Discoverers, Boorstin undertakes an interpretative history of creativity in Western civilization encompassing all the arts. Creativity, he suggests, is a relatively recent phenomenon with Judeo-Christian roots: the Jews' covenant with Yahweh "sealed . . . man's capacity to imitate God as a creator," and Christianity, by turning our gaze to the future, "played a leading role in the discovery of our powers to create." In the eminent historian's Eurocentric scenario, the Buddha "aimed at Un-Creation" and intimated the existence of a supreme power who was "no model for man the creator." Likewise, Boorstin presents Islamic religion as "the inhibitor of the arts," and his chapter-length forays into Chinese painting and Japanese architecture are unsatisfying, leaving the impression that the truly great creative endeavors are the province of the West. Nevertheless, this is an enormously stimulating volume, an epic work of immeasurable riches. Boorstin contemplates architects' attempts to conquer time and outlast the brief span of human life through prehistoric megaliths, Egypt's pyramids, Greek temples, the Roman Pantheon and modern-day skyscrapers. He offers wonderfully attuned readings of varied versions of the human comedy from Boccaccio and Chaucer to Balzac. Modern writers, he asserts, created the self by probing "the wilderness within," as chapters here on Melville, Dostoyevski, Kafka, Joyce and Virginia Woolf attest. Highly opinionated and quirky, Boorstin says virtually nothing about Mozart's unique triumphs of the spirit, yet he exalts Beethoven as a "prophet and pioneer." Packed with shrewd, pithy judgments and entertaining biographical profiles of Dante, Da Vinci, Goethe, Ben Franklin, Picasso and dozens more, this eloquent, remarkable synthesis sets the achievements of individual creative geniuses into a coherent narrative framework of humanity's advance from darkness and ignorance. First serial to U.S. News & World Report; BOMC main selection. (Sept.) .
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 811 pages
• Publisher: Random House; 1st edition (September 8, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0394543955
• ISBN-13: 978-0394543956
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.1 x 2.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #197,618 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

64 of 67 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It is about the individual as a creator, September 8, 2000

By 

Guillermo Maynez (Mexico, Distrito Federal Mexico) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (Paperback)

I am totally dissatisfied with most reviews of this book. I think most of that people did not understand what the book is all about. Boorstin traces, wonderfully, in my opinion, the history of the individual as a creator of original and personal ways to see and interpret the world. Of course, he had to focus on the Western culture. I am amazed to read politically correct people enraged about Boorstin's supposed "trashing" of non-Western cultures, something I definitely didn't find in the book. He describes exactly why it was the Western culture the one that allowed the individual to become a real creator, not just a fine artisan. He never says Western culture is "better", only different in that it produced the only way to be an artist: be an individual (for good and bad). And he is right. The book is fascinating in the way it describes the rise of the individual. Of course, the path he chose could have been different. But it's very illustrative. The book can not be boring. It shows exactly the kind of geniuses that created art. Most of them, by the way, lived difficult and often tragic lives. I recommend it to every one interested in finding out how and why modern art was born and developed. Besides, it is full of interesting, even funny, anecdotes about the lives of the creators. If you read it, it will be the best stimulus to see, read, and listen to some of the most important creations of humankind.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Discoverers for the more artistically minded, June 15, 2006

By 

Joseph M (Colorado, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (Paperback)

The Creators by Daniel Boorstin is an excellant read. This book was more reader friendly then The Discoverers and just as well researched. As Boorstin does in the Discoverers, each chapter tells the life story of an artist/musician/architech and while doing this goes in depth on this person's works.

The areas of focus for this book are:
1. "The Riddle of Creation" (creation stories in differant cultures)
a. Worlds without beginnings (eastern religions)
b. A creator-god (mostly western religions)
2."Creator Man" (stone age through middle ages)
a. The Power of Stone (early monuments)
b. The Magic of Images (writing)
c. The Immortal Word (the first books)
3."Re-Creating the World" (middle ages to 1920's)
a. Otherworldly Elements (religous art)
b. The Human Comedy (books of the late middle ages to more modern books)
c. From Craftsman to Artist (Paintings)
d. Conjuring with time and space (light, buildings, etc.)
4. "Creating the self" (modern times)
a. The Vanguard Word (famous books)
b. The Wilderness Within (authors and painters who excluded themselves from society)

These differant areas cover the main areas of the arts through the ages.

The only problem with this book was the music sections. For some one with no musical experiance, the book was a little over my head. This is about 50-100 pages of the book.

I would suggest this book to others.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The "Cliff Notes" of 2000 years of Western Art History, April 3, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (Paperback)

I have completed "The Creators" Heros of the Imagination by Daniel Boorstein. One of the three in a series. The other two are, "The Discoverers" and "The Seekers" Though my copy is beaten up and falling apart, I recommend this book to any inquisitive mind who thinks that they lost out on a classical education. My reading of the book took well over a year, in little reads here and there, when I could. Absolutely jam packed with useful information about the stuff that I didn't learn in my US public schooling. Well written for covering over 2000 years of history and the creative artists, writers, musicians, etc. and other influential people of the period.

Sometimes I had to set with a dictionary open and ready, just to get through the sections, especially the part on Greek temple construction. The reading of this book helped me to appreciate more of what I've seen in Rome, Italy and elsewhere on my trips. The sections on Dante, Giotto, Shakespeare, Goethe, Verdi, Wagner, Beethoven, Voltaire, Dickens, Sartre, Kafka and others were very revealing and stuff that I had never been made aware of. Everything in the US has been tremendously influenced by Europe and before that by the Greeks and the Romans. Nothing is new, the Romans made concrete 2000 years ago.