Pulitzer Prize to Louis Menand

The Graduate Center's recently appointed Distinguished Professor of English Louis Menand has just crossed disciplines to stellar effect, winning the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in history for The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. This study, widely acclaimed when it appeared in 2001, examines the lives and work of four major American thinkers, William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Charles Sanders Pierce, and a late-comer, Thomas Dewey.

The club referred to in the title was a conversational salon formed in 1872 by young intellectuals in Cambridge, Massa-chusetts. Though it lasted only a brief time, Menand establishes it as being crucial to the later development of that quintessentially American philosophy, pragmatism.