Joseph Epstein presents the major strands of past thinking about the richly complex subject of friendship--a subject, as he contends, without a theory. He attempts to show how friendship has evolved over the centuries, to the point where its nature in this, our therapeutic age, seems to have changed, with the result that friendship, like too much else in contemporary society, often presents itself as a problem.

Joseph Epstein is an emeritus lecturer at Northwestern University. He was the editor of American Scholar Magazine from 1975 to 1997 and has published several collections of essays. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, and other magazines. Mr. Epstein is the author of Snobbery: The American Version and is currently at work on the forthcoming The Art of Friendship.