A Writer of Our Time
The Life and Work of John Berger
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"This engaging intellectual biography traces Berger’s creative evolution, analyzes highlights from his vast output ... and situates them within his empathetic Marxism."
–The New Yorker
The first intellectual biography of the life and work of John Berger
John Berger was one of the most influential thinkers and writers of postwar Europe. As a novelist, he won the Booker prize in 1972, donating half his prize money to the Black Panthers. As a TV presenter, he changed the way we looked at art with Ways of Seeing. As a storyteller and political activist, he defended the rights and dignity of workers, migrants, and the oppressed around the world. “Far from dragging politics into art,” he wrote in 1953, “art has dragged me into politics.” He remained a revolutionary up to his death in January 2017.Built around a series of watersheds, at once personal and historical, A Writer of Our Time traces Berger’s development from his roots as a postwar art student and polemicist in the Cold War battles of 1950s London, through the heady days of the 1960s—when the revolutions were not only political but sexual and artistic—to Berger’s reinvention as a rural storyteller and the long hangover that followed the rise and fall of the New Left.
Drawing on first-hand, unpublished interviews and archival sources only recently made available, Joshua Sperling digs beneath the moments of controversy to reveal a figure of remarkable complexity and resilience. The portrait that emerges is of a cultural innovator as celebrated as he was often misunderstood, and a writer increasingly driven as much by what he loved as by what he opposed. A Writer of Our Time brings the many faces of John Berger together, repatriating one of our great minds to the intellectual dramas of his and our time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sperling, a visiting assistant professor of cinema studies at Oberlin, cogently argues that Marxist writer John Berger perhaps best known for the documentary-turned-book, Ways of Seeing (1972), and for, in the same year, winning (for his novel G.) and then immediately excoriating the Booker Prize merits serious attention for his career as a whole. With sophistication and passion to match his subject, Sperling unfolds a chronological and thematic assessment of Berger (1927 2017) that follows him from his early years as an art student and would-be painter in London, through his tenure as an ambitious art critic and cultural warrior for the New Statesman, to his fruitful and influential life as a self-exiled Continental writer and thinker. Berger's experiments in form track his political commitments and his engagement with the evolving cultural politics of the left. Sperling does not shy away from his subject's blind spots or contradictions, including with respect to gender politics, but he shows that Berger's critical and moral legacy remains vital. This study is a lively and astute contribution to the writing on Berger, as well as to scholarship on the last 50 years of the cultural left in general.