Daniel B. Smith has written a lengthy profile of Lewis Hyde for this week’s New York Times Magazine. In addition to delivering an endearing (and enduring) profile of Hyde and his practice (a favorite phrase: “I worked on how I work”), the article traces Hyde’s development as a poet in Minnesota, his work as an alcoholism counselor at the Cambridge City Ward, his travels to Cuernavaca to meet Ivan Illich, and, most interesting to me, his writing and the initial public reception of The Gift: “Hyde worked on The Gift for seven years, barely scraping by, spending long months hunting through obscure folk tales for narratives that reflected what he came to call ‘the commerce of the creative spirit.’ When the book was finally published, the critic Martha Bayles castigated it in The New York Times for naïvely ‘esp[ying] a noble savage in every struggling artist’—a critique that was echoed elsewhere. Yet the artistic community immediately embraced Hyde’s work. A bevy of poets, including Robert Pinsky, Donald Hall and Gary Snyder, published a group letter in The Times responding to Bayles’s review and praising Hyde’s ‘search to regain the unity of economic, aesthetic, social and religious life.’ Bill Viola, the pioneering video artist, remembers New York artists in the 1980s excitedly exchanging dog-eared, marked-up copies. ‘In a society that mostly talks about money,’ says Margaret Atwood, who keeps a half-dozen copies of The Gift on hand at all times to distribute to artists she thinks will benefit from it, ‘Lewis carved out a little island where you can say, “Life doesn’t always work that way.”’” I routinely give copies of The Gift to friends as well, but I love the idea of exchanging it with notes. (Hyde would call this “giving increase.”) Last but not least, Smith shares that Hyde is at work on a follow-up (of sorts) to The Gift, which focuses on the idea of the commons from its development in medieval times to its arrival in America. An abstract and 11-page PDF excerpt is available (free) on Hyde’s website here.