A National Book Award
Stephen Greenblatt, the Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, has won the National Book Award for nonfiction for “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern,” which describes how an ancient Roman philosophical epic helped to pave the way for modern thought. In accepting the prestigious award, the Harvard professor told attendees that his work is “about the power of books to cross boundaries, to speak to you across space and time and distance. “I’m tremendously honored and deeply moved,” Greenblatt said. “My book is about the magic of the written word and about the strangeness of a poem that was written 2,000 years ago, a great and difficult poem that disappeared for 1,000 years and then came back.” Greenblatt’s book tells the story of a Roman epic poem, “On the Nature of Things,” by Lucretius, that 2,000 years ago posited a number of revolutionary ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of...