WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2012

Almost six hundred years ago, a short, genial man took a very old manuscript off a library shelf. With excitement, he saw what he had discovered and ordered it copied. The book was a miraculously surviving copy of an ancient Roman philosophical epic,On the Nature of Thingsby Lucretius and it changed the course of history.

He found a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion. These ideas fuelled the Renaissance, inspiring Botticelli, shaping the thoughts of Montaigne, Darwin and Einstein.

An innovative work of history by one of the worlds most celebrated scholars and a thrilling story of discovery,The Swervedetails how one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, made possible the world as we know it.

Winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Nonfiction

Stephen Greenblattis Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of twelve books, includingThe Swerve: How the World BecameModern, which won the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, as well as the New York Times bestsellerWill in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeareand the classic university textRenaissance Self-Fashioning.

He is General Editor ofThe Norton Anthology of English Literatureand ofThe Norton Shakespeare,and has edited seven collections of literary criticism.