Christopher Lasch (1932-1994) was a prominent American historian and social critic. Beginning in the 1960s and continuing into the 1990s his writings defined the role of the intellectual and explored the source of the ills of society.

Born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1932, Christopher Lasch received his undergraduate degree at Harvard and his graduate degrees at Columbia, where he was a student of William Leuchtenburg and Richard Hofstadter. Lasch taught history at Williams College, Roosevelt University, the State University of Iowa, Northwestern, and, after 1970, the University of Rochester until he died on February 14, 1994 from cancer. According to former student, Casey Blake of Indiana University, Lasch saw himself as a historian and a public moralist, someone who could help Americans come to terms with their own contemporary situation.

Published Works

Lasch's first book, published in 1962, was a study of the reaction of American liberals to the Russian Revolution. It was...