This sweeping work of history and criticism by Pulitzer Prize—winner Louis Menand (The Metaphysical Club) is, in writer Jill Lepore’s words, “an essential road map to the middle decades of the twentieth century, from Sartre, Trilling, and Mailer to Sontag, Rauschenberg, and Baldwin. Every page is bracing; the whole amounts to an epic. In a landmark study of a time when art and ideas mattered, Menand’s very act of interpretation, the book itself, shows why they still do.”

I designed the book’s cover—which incorporates a striking archival black-and-white image of the Statue of Liberty I was lucky enough to find after a fair amount of research—with Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s Rodrigo Corral.