Bollingen

This lively, intimate, sometimes disrespectful, but always knowledgeable history of the Bollingen Foundation confirms its pervasive influence on American intellectual life. Conceived by Paul and Mary Mellon as a means of publishing in English the collected works of C. G. Jung, the Foundation broadened to encompass scholarship and publication in a remarkable number of fields. Here are wonderful portraits of the central figures, including the Mellons, Jung himself, Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell, D. T. Suzuki, Natacha Rambova, Vladimir Nabokov, Gershom Scholem, Herbert Read, and Kurt and Helen Wolff. "Because we know so little about the role of foundations in American intellectual life, we welcome . . . William McGuire's delightful chronicle of the Bollingen Foundation. Mr. McGuire . . . writes as a participant, not as an outside historian. But he makes the most of his particular perspective. . . And he tempers his sympathetic attachment with a winning sense of irony, even irreverence."--Thomas Bender, The New York Times Book Review