In 1987, Professor Richard Stivers was the recipient of an Earhart Foundation research fellowship to undertake a study of American morality. The Culture of Cynicism is the result. It is not only the most wide-ranging book yet written on the subject, tracing the intellectual history of American morality from its European origins in the Middle Ages to the 1990s, but alos by far the most thought-provoking.

Richard Stivers is Professor of Sociology at Illinois State University.