The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
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| Author | Stephen Greenblatt |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Non-fiction |
| Publisher | W. W. Norton & Company |
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Publication date
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September 26, 2011 (hardcover) September 3, 2012 (paperback) September 19, 2011 (kindle) |
| Pages | 356 |
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The Swerve: How the World Became Modern is a book by Stephen Greenblatt and winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and 2011 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Greenblatt tells the story of how Poggio Bracciolini, a 15th-century papal emissary and obsessive book hunter, saved the last copy of the Roman poet Lucretius's On the Nature of Things from near-terminal neglect in a German monastery, thus reintroducing important ideas that sparked the modern age.
The title and the subtitle of the book are explained in the author's preface. "The Swerve" refers to a key conception in the ancient atomistic theories according to which atoms moving through the void are subject to clinamen: while falling straight through the void, they are sometimes subject to a slight, unpredictable swerve. Greenblatt uses it to describe the history of Lucretius' own book: "The reappearance of his poem was such a swerve, an unforeseen deviation from the direct trajectory—in this case, toward oblivion—on which that poem and its philosophy seemed to be traveling." The recovery of the ancient text is seen as its rebirth, i.e. a "renaissance". Greenblatt's claim is that it was a 'key moment' in a larger "story.. of how the world swerved in a new direction"
The book attracted considerable critical attention, some positive and some negative. In addition to winning both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, it also won the Modern Language Association James Russell Lowell Prize.Publishers Weekly called it a "gloriously learned page-turner", and Newsweek called it "mesmerizing" and "richly entertaining".Maureen Corrigan, in her review for NPR, said that "The Swerve is one of those brilliant works of non-fiction that's so jam-packed with ideas and stories it literally boggles the mind." It was included in the 2011 year-end lists of Publishers Weekly,The New York Times,Kirkus Reviews,NPR,The Chicago Tribune,Bloomberg,SFGate, the American Library Association, and The Globe and Mail.
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