Coomaraswamy: His Life and Work

Roger Lipsey's Coomaraswamy: His Life and Work is volume three of the Bollingen Foundation's scholarly edition of Ananda Coomaraswamy's writings, published by Princeton University Press, and is the standard biographical and intellectual account of Coomaraswamy's career, including his documented turn from a career in geology to comparative metaphysics and traditional art theory. Its authority rests on the Bollingen edition's recognized scholarly standing and on Lipsey's close engagement with Coomaraswamy's own papers and published work across his full career. Its limit is that a biography written within an edition dedicated to its subject's own writings can sit close to its subject's own perspective, so a critical external assessment of Coomaraswamy's more contested later theoretical positions benefits from an independent scholarly source alongside this authoritative biography.