Writers and Missionaries: Essays on the Radical Imagination

What does it mean to be a politically committed writer?

Through a close reading of the lives and works of some of the greatest intellectuals of recent times, Adam Shatz asks: do writers have an ethical imperative to question injustice? How can one remain a dispassionate thinker when involved in the cut and thrust of politics? And, in an age of horror and crisis, what does it mean to be a committed writer?

Shatz interrogates the major figures of twentieth and twenty-first century thought and f...