Richard Wolin is a highly regarded authority in the field of modern European intellectual history. He received a B.A. from Reed College, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from York University in Toronto and has held faculty positions at Reed College and Rice University where he was D.D. McMurtry Professor of History. He is the author of several books on subjects such as Martin Heidegger, Heidegger's influential Jewish students (Hannah Arendt, Karl Loewith, Hans Jonas, and Herbert Marcuse), Walter Benjamin, the history of twentieth-century ideas, and modern cultural criticism. In addition to his scholarly writing, Professor Wolin is a regular contributor to such publications as the New Republic, Dissent, Tikkun, and The Los Angeles Times, which has earned him a reputation as a leading public intellectual. He is on several editorial review boards and has received grants and awards from the German Marshall Fund, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Few twentieth-century thinkers have proven as influential as Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural and literary critic. Richard Wolin's book remains among the clearest and most insightful introductions to Benjamin's writings, offering a philosophically rich exposition of his complex relationship to Adorno, Brecht, Jewish Messianism, and Western Marxism. Wolin provides nuanced interpretations of Benjamin's widely studied writings on Baudelaire, historiography, and art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In a new Introduction written especially for this edition, Wolin discusses the unfinished Arcades Project, as well as recent tendencies in the reception of Benjamin's work and the relevance of his ideas to contemporary debates about modernity and postmodernity.