Stephen Greenblatt--Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning
author of The Swerve and Will in the World--investigates the life of
one of humankind's greatest stories.
Bolder, even, than the ambitious books for which Stephen Greenblatt is
already renowned, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve explores the
enduring story of humanity's first parents. Comprising only a few
ancient verses, the story of Adam and Eve has served as a mirror in
which we seem to glimpse the whole, long history of our fears and
desires, as both a hymn to human responsibility and a dark fable about
human wretchedness.
Tracking the tale into the deep past, Greenblatt uncovers the tremendous
theological, artistic, and cultural investment over centuries that made
these fictional figures so profoundly resonant in the Jewish, Christian,
and Muslim worlds and, finally, so very "real" to millions of people
even in the present. With the uncanny brilliance he previously brought
to his depictions of William Shakespeare and Poggio Bracciolini (the
humanist monk who is the protagonist of The Swerve), Greenblatt explores
the intensely personal engagement of Augustine, Dürer, and Milton in
this mammoth project of collective creation, while he also limns the
diversity of the story's offspring: rich allegory, vicious misogyny,
deep moral insight, and some of the greatest triumphs of art and
literature.
The biblical origin story, Greenblatt argues, is a model for what the
humanities still have to offer: not the scientific nature of things, but
rather a deep encounter with problems that have gripped our species for
as long as we can recall and that continue to fascinate and trouble us
today.
