A Pragmatist and His Free Spirit portrays the unconventional love of Hu Shi, a Chinese social reformer and civil rights pioneer, and Edith Clifford Williams, an American avant-garde artist of the early twentieth century. Hu studied at Cornell University, where he first met Williams, and Columbia University, where he worked with the famous pragmatist John Dewey. At the time of his death in 1962, he and Williams had exchanged more than 300 letters that, along with poems and excerpts from Hu's diaries and documents (some of which have never before been translated into English) form the center of this book. In Williams, Hu found his intellectual match, a woman and fellow scholar who helped the reformer reconcile his independent scholarship with cultural tradition. Williams counciled Hu on the acceptance of an arranged marriage, and she influenced his pursuit of experimental vernacular poetry through an exposure to avant-garde art. In 1933, the two became lovers, although their romance wou
Professor Frederick W. Mote (1922–2006) has been widely recognized as a key figure in the field of Sinology. He taught at Princeton University for thirty-one years and was a founder of both Princeton’s Department of East Asian Studies and its re-markable Gest (East Asian) Library. His distinguished record of scholarly publication includes the co-editing, with Professor Denis C. Twitchett, of volumes seven and eight of the Cambridge History of China. Although he is perhaps best known for his studies of the Ming dynasty, his special erudition, as demonstrated in his final book, Imperial China, 900–1800, spans the Song through Qing periods. Generations of his students and colleagues have admired him not only for his learning but for his generosity in sharing his broad understanding of China. This wide-ranging collection includes papers by David A. Sensabaugh, Geoff Wade, Hok-lam Chan, Tai-loi Ma, Martin Hei-jdra, Chen-main Wang, Thomas Bartlett, Paul R. Katz, Alfreda Murck and Perry Link
