This interview originally appeared at Progressive Book Club. One of America’s most distinguished historians and critics, Garry Wills is the author of numerous books, including Saint Augustine, Papal Sin, and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Lincoln at Gettysburg. He has won many other awards, among them two National Book Critics Circle Awards and the 1998 National Medal for the Humanities. He is currently Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern University.
Which books have most influenced you?Augustine’s Confessions and Trinity, since they explore the human soul as God’s Image; in politics, the non-Communist attacks on capitalism in John Ruskin’s Unto This Last made their mark - as they did on Gandhi and George Bernard Shaw; Lord Acton’s Lectures on the French Revolution give a sense of what his great unwritten work on liberty would have been.
This review originally appeared at Progressive Book Club.
