Pulitzer Prize-winning author, scholar and journalist Louis Menand is widely known as a staff writer for The New Yorker and for his critically-acclaimed bestseller, The Metaphysical Club. His latest work, American Studies, is a collection of his most insightful pieces written for The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. Menand reexamines cultural icons such as William James, T.S. Eliot, Norman Mailer, Pauline Kael, and Rolling Stone magazine, draws connections between such unlikely pairings as Larry Flynt's Hustler and Jerry Falwell's evangelism, and records his impressions of Al Gore in the White House and of Maya Lin at the site of the World Trade Center. To all of these, Menand applies his "incisive intellect, his playful wit and his contagious fascination with the interplay between people and ideas" (San Francisco Chronicle) with a brilliance that has been called intellectual and cultural history at its best.