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Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver
Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver
By Peter E. Gordon
Published February 24, 2026
224 pages
“A solid introduction to a 20th-century thinker whose influence has only increased over time.” —Kirkus Reviews
An accessible and authoritative biography of Walter Benjamin that guides the reader through the complexity of his intellectual legacy and the turbulence of his time
Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) is widely considered one of the most creative cultural critics of the twentieth century. Esteemed for his literary acumen and capacious imagination, he developed a unique style of criticism—his friend Hannah Arendt called it pearl-diving—that sought out fragments of redemption in the ruins of bourgeois civilization.
Award-winning author Peter E. Gordon tells Benjamin’s story in a vivid and poetic style, inviting the reader to look beyond the image of Benjamin as a tragic figure of German-Jewish history and portraying him as a complex personality of unique and multifaceted gifts. Tracing Benjamin’s life from his Berlin childhood to his Parisian exile, through the romanticism of the youth movements and the conflicts over modernism and Marxism, Gordon brings Benjamin to life.
About the Author
Peter E. Gordon teaches social theory and philosophy at Harvard University. His books include Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization and A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity. He lives in Cambridge, MA.
Author photograph © Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University
Reviews
Financial Times, ”What To Read in 2026“
“[A] perceptive biography of the German Jewish writer, focused on his ideas. . . . A solid introduction to a 20th-century thinker whose influence has only increased over time.”—Kirkus Reviews
“By reading Benjamin’s own texts against the grain of the hagiography that has come to surround him, Peter Gordon unwinds the myths, and in the most learned and informed fashion, gives us back the human being.”—Susan Buck-Morss, CUNY Graduate Center and Cornell University
