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Stephen Greenblatt tells the life history of the account of the first man and the first woman - central to all three of the world´s monotheistic religions and the object of innumerable representations by painters, sculptors and poets - which was the dominant story of the human race for thousands of years.

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Bolder, even, than the ambitious books for which Stephen Greenblatt is already renowned, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve explores the enduring story of humanity´s first parents. Comprising only a few ancient verses, the story of Adam and Eve has served as a mirror in which we seem to glimpse the whole, long history of our fears and desires, as both a hymn to human responsibility and a dark fable about human wretchedness. Tracking the tale into the deep past, Greenblatt uncovers the tremendous theological, artistic, and cultural investment over centuries that made these fictional figures so profoundly resonant in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim worlds and, finally, so very "real to millions of people even in the present. With the uncanny brilliance he previously brought to his depictions of William Shakespeare and Poggio Bracciolini (the humanist monk who is the protagonist of The Swerve), Greenblatt explores the intensely personal engagement of Augustine, Dürer, and Milton in this mammoth project of collective creation, while he also limns the diversity of the story´s offspring: rich allegory, vicious misogyny, deep moral insight, and some of the greatest triumphs of art and literature.

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Stephen Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. He is the author of twelve books including the The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (ISBN 978 0 393 34340 3); Shakespeare´s Freedom; Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (ISBN 978 0 393 35260 3); Hamlet in Purgatory and Renaissance Self-Fashioning. He is General Editor of The Norton Anthology of English Literature (ISBNs 978 0 393 91247 0 and 978 0 393 91301 9) and of The Norton Shakespeare (ISBN 978 0 393 93499 1), and has edited seven collections of criticism.

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