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.

Trickster disrupted the world around him, and in doing so he reshaped it. Playful, mischievous, subversive, amoral, tricksters are a great bother to have around, but they are also indispensable heroes of culture.
Trickster Makes This World revisits the stories of Coyote, Eshu and Hermes and holds them up against the life and work of more recent creators: Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Maxine Hong Kingston and others. Authoritative in its scholarship, supple and dynamic in its style, Trickster Makes This World encourages you to think and see afresh.