Robert M. Pirsig - Published Material

Published Material

Pirsig's work consists almost entirely of two novels. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance develops Pirsig's interpretation of "Quality" and "the Good." It is mostly a first person narrative based on a motorcycle trip he and his young son Chris took from Minneapolis to San Francisco. He also gives the reader a short summary of the history of philosophy, including his interpretation of the philosophy of Socrates as part of an ongoing dispute between "cosmologists" admitting the existence of a Universal Truth and the Sophists, opposed by Socrates and his student Plato. Pirsig also tries to combine Western and Eastern philosophy.

Pirsig's publisher's recommendation to his Board ended, "This book is brilliant beyond belief, it is probably a work of genius, and will, I'll wager, attain classic stature." Pirsig noted in an early interview, that Zen was rejected 121 times before being accepted by William Morrow Publishers. In his book review, George Steiner compared Pirsig's writing to Dostoevsky, Broch, Proust, and Bergson, stating that "the assertion itself is valid... the analogies with Moby-Dick are patent". The Times Literary Supplement called it "Profoundly important, Disturbing, Deeply moving, Full of insights, A wonderful book".

In 1974, Pirsig was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to allow him to write a follow-up, Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (1991), in which he develops a value-based metaphysics, called Metaphysics of Quality, to replace the subject-object view of reality.