Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, 75th Anniversary Illustrated Edition

Description

Edith Hamilton's MYTHOLOGY succeeds like no other book in bringing to life for the modern reader the Greek, Roman, and Norse myths that are the keystone of Western culture - the stories of gods and heroes that have inspired human creativity from antiquity to the present. We meet the Greek gods on Olympus and Norse gods in Valhalla. We follow the drama of the Trojan War and the wanderings of Odysseus. We hear the tales of Jason and the Golden Fleece, Cupid and Psyche, and might King Midas. We discover the origins of the names of the constellations. And we recognize reference points for countless works of art, literature, and cultural inquiry-from Freud's Oedipus complex to Wagner's Ring Cycle of operas to Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra. Praised throughout the world for its authority and lucidity, MYTHOLOGY is Edith Hamilton's masterpiece-the standard by which all other books on mythology are measured.

Edith Hamilton (1868-1963) was born of American parents in Dresden, Germany, and grew up in Indiana. Through the first quarter of the twentieth century she was the headmistress of the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore. Upon retiring, she began to write about the civilizations of the ancient world and soon gained world renown as a classicist. Her celebrated and bestselling books include Mythology, The Greek Way, The Roman Way, and The Echo of Greece. She regarded as the high point of her life a 1957 ceremony in which King Paul of Greece named her an honorary citizen of Athens.

Edith Hamilton retells the Greek, Roman, and Norse myths with a sure taste and scholarship that help to restore their quality as perennial and refreshing fables about human nature, including our own.--The New Yorker No one in modern times has shown us more vividly than Edith Hamilton 'the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.' Filtering the golden essence from the mass of classical literature, she proved how applicable to our daily lives are the humor and wisdom of more than 2,000 years ago.--New York Times