The Gift of Fire

Richard Mitchell was the Underground Grammarian. Here, back in print after many years, is The Gift of Fire, his last book, with a preface by his daughter, Daphne Mitchell Keller. In this collection of interconnected essays, he explores the teachings of Jesus and Socrates, parables of St. Peter and the Brothers Grimm, and the writings of Orwell and Aquinas, and considers what they have to teach us about living a good life. Best known for his long-running newsletter, The Underground Grammarian, and his previous writings about education, Mitchell guides his readers through the thorny perils of everyday morality, helping them respond with deep self-awareness to everything from traffic jams to war, partisan politics, and inequality. From the preface: "Nowhere in The Gift of Fire does Richard Mitchell, who was my father, claim that we can't think. Quite the opposite, in fact. There is no person, he says, who does not have the capacity to be educated, no one who lacks the ability to become able to tell the good from the bad, or who is somehow prevented forever from taking the grasp of his own mind. There are those who have not learned to do these things, or who are unwilling to do them, or who don't even know that they could be done. It's no surprise that many people don't do them. But he would (and in fact does) argue that every one of us could."