Howard Mansfield has written a dozen books, sifting through the commonplace and the forgotten to discover stories that tell us about ourselves and our place in the world. The late critic Guy Davenport said: ?Howard Mansfield has never written an uninteresting or dull sentence. All of his books are emotionally and intellectually nourishing. He is something like a cultural psychologist along with being a first-class cultural historian. He is humane, witty, bright-minded, and rigorously intelligent.?