Genius Came Early: Creativity in the Twentieth Century

This book by one of America's most thoughtful journalists explores the great voices of the twentieth century. From Sigmund Freud to Carl Jung, Albert Einstein to James Watson, Pablo Picasso to Mark Rothko, Virginia Woolf to Toni Morrison, George Gershwin to Andrew Lloyd Webber, Charlie Chaplin to Woody Allen, Cullum analyzes their gifts and their contribution to their own age. She also looks at giants of statecraft, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Nelson Mandela, who literally created new worlds.

Cullum delves into the importance of religion and spirituality in seminal lives. She discovers that a surprising number of painters and sculptors in the twentieth century have been obsessed with expressing universal truth in their work. And the spirit life, of course, was the essential force that fueled Gandhi and created his power to liberate India. It was that same spirit that reached across the years to inspire another liberator, Martin Luther King, Jr., in the United States.

Moral significance is what Lee Cullum finds in the turning of the century and the birth of the new millennium which is "a time of happiness and prosperity, an imagined golden age." Lee Cullum believes that a whole new golden age does indeed await us, if we can only imagine it. There is every reason for optimism.