Creating Minds: An Anatomy of Creativity Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Ghandi

by Howard E Gardner

Overview

This peerless classic guide to the creative self uses portraits of seven extraordinary individuals to reveal the patterns that drive the creative process — to demonstrate how circumstance also plays an indispensable role in creative success.

Howard Gardner changed the way the world thinks about intelligence. In his classic work Frames of Mind, he undermined the common notion that intelligence is a single capacity that every human being possesses to a greater or lesser extent. With Creating Minds, Gardner gives us a path breaking view of creativity, along with riveting portraits of seven figures who each reinvented an area of human endeavor.

Using as a point of departure his concept of seven "intelligences," ranging from musical intelligence to the intelligence involved in understanding oneself, Gardner examines seven extraordinary individuals — Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, T.S. Eliot, Martha Graham, and Mahatma Gandhi — each an outstanding exemplar of one kind of intelligence. Understanding the nature of their disparate creative breakthroughs not only sheds light on their achievements but also helps to elucidate the "modern era" — the times that formed these creators and which they in turn helped to define. While focusing on the moment of each creator's most significant breakthrough, Gardner discovers patterns crucial to our understanding of the creative process.

Creative people feature unusual combinations of intelligence and personality, and Gardner delineates the indispensable role of the circumstances in which an individual's creativity can thrive — and how extraordinary creativity almost always carries with it extraordinary human costs.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465027743
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	12/06/2011
Edition description:	Second Edition
Pages:	464
Sales rank:	793,979
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.40(d)
Age Range:	13 - 18 Years

About the Author

Howard Gardner is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Senior Director of Harvard Project Zero. The author of more than twenty books and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and twenty-one honorary degrees, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Preface to the 2011 Edition xiii

Part I Introduction

1 Chance Encounters in Wartime Zurich 3

2 Approaches to Creativity 19

Part II The Creators of the Modern Era

3 Sigmund Freud: Alone with the World 47

4 Albert Einstein: The Perennial Child 83

Interlude One 124

5 Pablo Picasso: Prodigiousness and Beyond 127

6 Igor Stravinsky: The Poetics and Politics of Music 173

7 T. S. Eliot: The Marginal Master 211

Interlude Two 243

8 Martha Graham: Discovering the Dance of America 247

9 Mahatma Gandhi: A Hold upon Others 289

Interlude Three 328

Part III Conclusion

10 Creativity Across the Domains 333

Epilogue: The Modern Era and Beyond 363

Notes 377

Bibliography 405

Name Index 421

Subject Index 429