Background and education

Menand was born in Syracuse, New York, and raised around Boston, Massachusetts. His mother was a historian, who wrote a biography of Samuel Adams. Menand's father, Louis Menand III, taught political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His grandfather and great-grandfather owned the Louis Menand House, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985.

A graduate of Pomona College, Menand attended Harvard Law School for one year (1973-1974) before left to earn a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University in 1980.

Print and the Academy

Menand thereafter taught at Princeton University and held staff positions at The New Republic and The New Yorker. He served as Distinguished Professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York before accepting a post at Harvard in 2003.

Menand published his first book, Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context, in 1987. His long-anticipated second book, A Story of Ideas in America, includes detailed biographical material on Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey. It received the Pulitzer Prize for History, the 2002 Francis Parkman Prize, and The Heartland Prize for Non-Fiction. In 2002, Menand published American Studies, a collection of essays on prominent figures in American culture.

Menand is the Robert M. and Anne T. Bass Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. His principal field of academic interest is 19th and 20th century American cultural history. He contributes to The New Yorker, for which he remains a staff writer, and The New York Review of Books, among other publications.

• Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and his Context, 1987, New York: Oxford University Press
• The Future of Academic Freedom, (editor), 1996, Chicago: U of Chicago Press
• Pragmatism: A Reader, (editor), 1997, New York: Vintage
• The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, 2001, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, ISBN 0-374-19963-9 (hardcover), ISBN 0-374-52849-7 (paperback)
• American Studies, 2002, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, ISBN 0-374-10434-4 (hardcover)
• The Marketplace of Ideas, 2010, New York: W. W. Norton, ISBN 978-0-393-06275-5

Interviews

• Louis Menand on Reforming U.S. Universities from NPR's All Things Considered (Air Date: 1/18/10)
• Menand interview on The Metaphysical Club on All Things Considered (link to WM and RM audio)
• "New New York Intellectual: An Interview with Louis Menand" in the Minnesota Review, (June 1, 2001). archived URL retrieved August 10, 2006