The Swerve — Stephen Greenblatt

Greenblatt tells the story of how a Florentine humanist named Poggio Bracciolini found, in a German monastery in 1417, a copy of Lucretius's De Rerum Natura — an Epicurean poem arguing for a universe of atoms, without divine purpose, in which pleasure rather than asceticism was the appropriate human response. The poem had been lost for over a thousand years. Greenblatt traces its recovery, its transmission through Renaissance Europe, and its long influence on the development of modern secular thought, from Montaigne to Jefferson.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the National Book Award. 'A magnificent book — learned, witty, and deeply pleasurable.' — The Guardian. 'Greenblatt has written a detective story about ideas, and it is a wonder.' — New York Times Book Review