Louis Menand

Louis Menand (/ˈluːi məˈnɑːnd/; born January 21, 1952) is an American critic and essayist, best known for his book The Metaphysical Club (2001), an intellectual and cultural history of late 19th and early 20th century America.

Menand was born in Syracuse, New York, and raised around Boston, Massachusetts. His mother, Catherine (Shults) Menand, was a historian, who wrote a biography of Samuel Adams. His father, Louis Menand III, taught political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His grandfather and great-grandfather owned the Louis Menand House, located in Menands, New York, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985. The village of Menands is named after his great-grandfather, a 19th-century horticulturalist.

A graduate of Pomona College, Menand attended Harvard Law School for one year (1973–1974) before he left to earn M.A. (1975) and Ph.D. (1980) degrees in English from Columbia University.

He 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.

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