Menand, Louis, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2001).
Covering American history in the years between the Civil War and the end of the First World War, Menand draws masterful portraits of four giants of American thought – Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Pierce, and John Dewey – whose ideas changed the way Americans think.