Few public intellectuals have had such a big impact outside the academy as Edward Said.This, the first full-length intellectual biography of the groundbreaking author of Orientalism, reveals some startling observations. Abdirahman Hussein argues that underneath Said's carefully constructed eclecticism there is a global method in his work. Taking Beginnings as the key text Hussein asserts that the discontinuity of the Palestinian experience informs Said's entire oeuvre but simultaneously transcends it in a permanent search for a new synthesis. Hussein argues that this informs Said's approach not only to Conrad, Swift, and Eliot, but also to Lukacs, Williams, Gramsci and Adorno.