The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (47 page)

This is the most personal volume of the trilogy that began with
The Discoverers
and
The Creators,
as it concerns those Seekers in our Western past who have most helped me toward seeing meaning and purpose in history. The acknowledgments for this volume should include those noted in the earlier volumes, for my pursuit of discoverers and creators has led me into the paths to meaning that I explore here. This book would have been impossible without the incomparable collections of the Library of Congress.

It is a pleasure to thank friends and fellow scholars who have given me suggestions or read parts of the manuscript. They have saved me from errors of fact, have helped me on to new paths, but have often not shared my interpretations or my emphases. They include Gerald Holton, Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Professor of History of Science, Emeritus, Harvard University; Bernard Knox, Director Emeritus of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C.; Professor R. W. B. Lewis of Yale University; Professor Kenneth Lynn of Johns Hopkins University; Peter Marzio, Director, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Professor Edmund S. Morgan of Yale University; Professor Jaroslav Pelikan of Yale University; Gerard Piel, former editor and publisher of
Scientific American;
and my sons, Paul Boorstin, Jonathan Boorstin, and David Boorstin.

Again, Robert D. Loomis, vice president and executive editor of Random House, has shown me how a publishing editor at his best can guide and encourage an author. Most important has been his guidance toward what this book should (and should not) try to be. And by his insistence on what I should omit he has helped me give focus to the book.

Ruth F. Boorstin, my wife and intellectual companion, has been as always my principal and most penetrating editor. Her poet’s feeling for words and her impatience with vagueness and the cliché have made the book briefer and more readable. To dedicate this book to her is, once again, a conspicuous understatement, which is only one of the literary virtues she has tried to teach me.

Historian, public servant, and author, DANIEL J. BOORSTIN, the Librarian of Congress Emeritus, directed the Library from 1975 to 1987. He had previously been director of the National Museum of History and Technology, and senior historian of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Before that he was the Preston and Sterling Morton Distinguished Service Professor of History at the University of Chicago, where he taught for twenty-five years.

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Boorstin graduated with highest honors from Harvard College and received his doctorate from Yale University. As a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, England, he won a coveted double first in two degrees in law and was admitted as a barrister-at-law of the Inner Temple, London. He is also a member of the Massachusetts bar. He has been visiting professor at the University of Rome, the University of Geneva, the University of Kyoto in Japan, and the University of Puerto Rico. In Paris he was the first incumbent of a chair in American history at the Sorbonne, and at Cambridge University, England, he was Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions and Fellow of Trinity College. Boorstin has lectured widely in the United States and all over the world. He has received numerous honorary degrees and has been decorated by the governments of France, Belgium, Portugal, and Japan. He is married to the former Ruth Frankel, the editor of all his works, and they have three sons and four grandchildren.

The Discoverers,
Boorstin’s history of man’s search to know the world and himself, was published in 1983. A Book-of-the-Month Club Main Selection,
The Discoverers
was on the
New York Times
best-seller list for half a year and won the Watson Davis Prize of the History of Science Society. This and his other books have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Boorstin’s many books include
The Americans: The Colonial Experience
(1958), which won the Bancroft Prize;
The Americans: The National Experience
(1965), which won the Parkman Prize; and
The Americans: The Democratic Experience
(1973), which won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Dexter Prize and was a Book-of-the-Month Club Main Selection. Among his other books are
The Mysterious Science of the Law
(1941),
The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson
(1948),
The Genius of American Politics
(1953),
The Image
(1962),
The Republic of Technology
(1978), and
The Daniel J. Boorstin Reader
(1995). For young people he has written the
Landmark History of the American People.
His textbook for high schools,
A History of the United States
(1980), written with Brooks M. Kelley, has been widely adopted. He is the editor of
An American Primer
(1966) and the thirty-volume series
The Chicago History of American Civilization,
among other works.

BOOKS BY DANIEL J. BOORSTIN

The Discoverers

*

The Creators

*

The Seekers

*

The Americans: The Colonial Experience

The Americans: The National Experience

The Americans: The Democratic Experience

*

The Mysterious Science of the Law

The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson

The Genius of American Politics

America and the Image of Europe

The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America

The Decline of Radicalism

The Sociology of the Absurd

Democracy and Its Discontents

The Republic of Technology

The Exploring Spirit

The Republic of Letters

Hidden History

Cleopatra’s Nose

The Daniel J. Boorstin Reader

The Landmark History of the American People
(with Ruth F. Boorstin)

A History of the United States
(with Brooks M. Kelley)