Published Works
In 2002 her debut poetry collection The Next Ancient World received the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, as well as ForeWord Magazine's award for Poetry Book of the Year. Her second collection, Funny, won the 2005 Felix Pollak Prize from the University of Wisconsin Press.
In 2003 Hecht published two books of history and philosophy with two different publishers. The first, Doubt: A History, is an epic, worldwide study of religious doubt throughout history. The other, The End of the Soul, is a profile of an unusual group of nineteenth-century French anthropologists who formed the Society of Mutual Autopsy to discover links between personality, ability and brain morphology. It received the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award for 2004 from the Phi Beta Kappa Society as a book that "is an important contribution to knowledge, serious scholarship with a broad pertinence to the human condition."
In 2007 Hecht published The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong in which she attempts to examine happiness through historical perspective. Hecht maintains that our current perception of happiness is affected by culture, and that future generations may well mock our view of happiness as we make fun of earlier generations.
Read more about this topic: Jennifer Michael Hecht
Famous quotes containing the words published and/or works:
“To me a book is a message from the gods to mankind; or, if not, should never be published at all.... A message from the gods should be delivered at once. It is damnably blasphemous to talk about the autumn season and so on. How dare the author or publisher demand a price for doing his duty, the highest and most honourable to which a man can be called?”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)
“All his works might well enough be embraced under the title of one of them, a good specimen brick, “On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History.” Of this department he is the Chief Professor in the World’s University, and even leaves Plutarch behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)