Discover the Best Books Written by Jonathan Gottschall

Jonathan Gottschall (born September 20, 1972) is an American literary scholar specializing in literature and evolution. He holds the title of Research Fellow in the English department of Washington & Jefferson College in Pennsylvania. He is the author or editor of seven books. He completed graduate work in English at the State University of New York at Binghamton, where he worked under David Sloan Wilson.

Gottschall was profiled by The New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His work was featured in an article in Science describing literature and evolution. His work The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence and the World of Homer describes the Homeric epic poems Iliad and Odyssey in terms of evolutionary psychology, with the central violent conflicts in these works driven by the lack of young women to marry and the resulting evolutionary legacy, as opposed to the violent conflicts being driven by honor or wealth.

Literature, Science and a New Humanities advocate that the humanities, and literary studies in particular, need to avail themselves of quantitative and objective methods of inquiry as well as the traditional qualitative and subjective, if they are to produce cumulative, progressive knowledge, and provides a number of case studies that apply quantitative methods to fairy and folk tale around the world to answer questions about human universals and differences.

Gottschall's book, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (Houghton Mifflin 2012), is about the evolutionary mystery of storytelling—about the way we shape stories, and stories shape us.[9] A review by The Virginian-Pilot said, "Gottschall assesses and accounts for that powerful narrative attraction in a compelling chronicle of his own...and it is a certifiable knee-slap, three-pipe, blue-moon ripsnorter. The Storytelling Animal was a New York Times Editor's Choice selection and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist.

In the book The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight, and Why We Like to Watch (Penguin 2015), Gottschall describes the three years he spent at a Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) gym trying to learn how to fight. He uses this experience as a way to explore the evolutionary psychology of violence, masculinity, and sports.

In 2021, Gottschall published The Story Paradox: How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears Them Down. The book received a harshly critical review by Timothy D. Snyder in the New York Times. This led to letters to the editor by Steven Pinker, his work also being critically in the article, and Gottschall.