During his thirty-year career early in this century, economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) tweaked the sensibilities of his time with unrelenting criticism of American business culture. He also attacked other sacred American institutions: religion, sports and games, the traditional views of the role of women, the class system, the credit system, and certain aspects of academic life.

His ideas on society, however, were often dismissed because of his reputation as an eccentric and a womanizer. In this new biography, the Jorgensens present Veblen as a sensitive, brilliant, passionate, and sometimes foolishly chivalric man. They culled material primarily from letters written by Veblen, his relatives, and colleagues. The result is an entirely new appraisal of an increasingly influential but often misunderstood twentieth-century intellectual.