SOURCE: "Envoy to Two Cultures," in Time, Vol. 141, No. 25, June 21, 1993, pp. 60-2.

In the following essay, Hughes summarizes the controversies and achievements of Said's life.

Huge as American academe is, it has few public intellectuals—men or women whose views carry weight with general readers off-campus. Near the top of any list of such people is a tall, elegantly tailored, 57-year-old American of Palestinian descent who for the past 30 years has taught English and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York City: Edward Said.

Said (pronounced Sigh-eed) owes his fame partly to his cultural criticism, notably his 1978 book Orientalism, a study of how ideas and images about the Arab world were contrived by Western writers and why. Now comes Culture and Imperialism. A plum pudding of a book, with excursions on such matters as Irish-nationalist poetry and the building of an opera house in Cairo for...