The late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once said of Russell Kirk, “No one has had a greater role in the formation of American conservative thought.” His was a shared admiration. The author of more than 30 books and hundreds of essays, reviews, and syndicated columns, Kirk is an acknowledged founder of the modern conservative movement in the U.S.

Brad Birzer, the Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American Studies and a professor of history at Michigan’s Hillsdale College, examines the meaning of imagination as understood by this “eccentric man of letters.” Kirk, who died in 1994, hoped to enliven western and American civilization after World War II with liberal education, small communities of friends, and speculative fiction.

Birzer is the author of Russell Kirk: American Conservative, winner of the 2016 Paolucci Book Prize as the previous year’s “best work of conservative scholarship.”