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

The man who revolutionized our understanding of intelligence now gives us a pathbreaking view of creativity, along with riveting portraits of seven figures who each reinvented an area of human endeavor. Understanding their diverse achievements not only sheds light on the nature of creativity but also elucidates the modern erathe times that formed them and that they in turn helped to define. Howard Gardner changed the way we think 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. Now building on the framework he developed for understanding intelligence, 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 individualsSigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, T. S. Eliot, Martha Graham, and Mahatma Gandhieach 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 erathe times that formed these creators and which they in turn helped to define. While focusing on the moment of each creators most significant breakthrough, Gardner discovers patterns crucial to our understanding of the creative process. Not surprisingly, Gardner believes that a single variety of creativity is a myth. But he supplies evidence that certain personality configurations and needs characterize creative individuals in our time, and that numerous commonalities color the ways in which ideas are conceived, articulated, and disseminated to the public. He notes, for example, that it almost invariably takes ten years to make the initial creative breakthrough and another ten years for subsequent breakthroughs. Creative people feature unusual combinations of intelligence and personality, and Gardner delineates the indispensable role of the circumstances in which an individual works and the crucial reactions of the surrounding group of informed peers. He finds that an essential element of the creative process is the support of caring individuals who believe in the revolutionary ideas of the creators. And he documents the fact that extraordinary creativity almost always carries with it extraordinary costs in human terms.

Table of Contents:
Introduction; Chance Encounters in Wartime Zurich; Approaches to Creativity; The Creators Of The Modern Era; Sigmund Freud: Alone with the World; Albert Einstein: The Perennial Child; Interlude One; Pablo Picasso: Prodigiousness and Beyond; Igor Stravinsky: The Poetics and Politics of Music; T.S. Eliot: The Marginal Master; Interlude Two; Martha Graham: Discovering the Dance of America; Mahatma Gandhi: A Hold upon Others; Interlude Three; Conclusion; Creativity across the Domains; Epilogue: The Modern Era and Beyond.

About the Author :
Howard Gardner is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor in Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Among numerous honors, Gardner received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship in 1981. In 1990, he was the first American to receive the University of Louisville's Grawemeyer Award in education. In 2000, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.