A Writer of Our Time

The first intellectual biography of the life and work of John BergerJohn Berger was one of the most influential thinkers and writers of postwar Europe. As a novelist, he won the Booker prize in 1972, donating half his prize money to the Black Panthers. As a TV presenter, he changed the way we looked at art with Ways of Seeing. As a storyteller and political activist, he defended the rights and dignity of workers, migrants, and the oppressed around the world. &;Far from dragging politics into art,&; he wrote in 1953, &;art has dragged me into politics.&; He remained a revolutionary up to his death in January 2017. Built around a series of watersheds, at once personal and historical, A Writer of Our Time traces Berger&;s development from his roots as a postwar art student and polemicist in the Cold War battles of 1950s London, through the heady days of the 1960s&;when the revolutions were not only political but sexual and artistic&;to Berger&;s reinvention as a rural storyteller and the long hangover that followed the rise and fall of the New Left. Drawing on first-hand, unpublished interviews and archival sources only recently made available, Joshua Sperling digs beneath the moments of controversy to reveal a figure of remarkable complexity and resilience. The portrait that emerges is of a cultural innovator as celebrated as he was often misunderstood, and a writer increasingly driven as much by what he loved as by what he opposed. A Writer of Our Time brings the many faces of John Berger together, repatriating one of our great minds to the intellectual dramas of his and our time.