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Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)
Few works have captured the national zeitgeist quite like Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a first-person account of the author's motorcycle trip from Minnesota to California. According to the Daily Beast, "It is a nostalgic, old-fashioned novel that nevertheless reflects the malaise of its era and prefigures our own technophiliac age." This work puts forth Pirsig's theory of the "Metaphysics of Quality," a hybrid philosophy in which quality cannot be defined because it exists only in the present, based on one's individual experience. Pirsig wrote the book, which takes place over seventeen days, during a four-year period while he held a job as a writer of computer manuals. |