Pursuits of Happiness: On Being Interested

by Eva Brann

“[Brann] is a person of many strong interests. The central chapter of this book, 'On Being Interested,' offers a road map to staying cultivate real interests . . . For John Locke and his disciple Thomas Jefferson, happiness is not pleasure. Like those precursors, Brann teaches Americans to free themselves from attachment to superficial gratifications and to pursue a higher-quality contentment with life. She locates this contentment in our ‘interestedness.’ . . . As an American, my encounter with Brann’s work calls me back to a sense of my own good fortune. Against a keening background noise of lament—over the economy, the climate, the pandemic, the predations of technology, crime—Eva Brann’s bright witness lifts me up and out.” —Peggy Ellsberg, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Brann holds us steady in a world that sometimes seems chaotic . . . At this time, the loudest voices among us are dystopian, and spoken language is losing all civility. If you want a change from this, Pursuits of Happiness is a good place to start. Here’s a fascinating, independent-minded writer whose words connect us to living more fully toward a more beneficial life—thought-forms as catalysts."— Washington Independent Review of Books

The essays of Pursuits of Happiness are articulations of Eva Brann’s “vocational” happiness of thinking things through. To Ms. Brann our inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness is the right not to an “endless chase,” but rather the right to the actual practice of happiness, as in the “pursuit of a vocation.” With essays like “Tips on Reading Homer” and “The Greatness of Great Books” she keeps at her to understand the world around us, and between us, to listen to our inner self-talk, and to consider what comes, perhaps, from beyond us.

612 pages, Paperback

Published September 29, 2020

About the author

Eva T. H. Brann was an American scholar, classicist, and the longest-serving tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. Born in Berlin in 1929 and later immigrating to the U.S., she earned degrees from Brooklyn College and Yale University. Brann devoted over six decades to teaching and writing, becoming a key figure in the Great Books tradition and serving as dean of St. John’s College.
Her wide-ranging works include Paradoxes of Education in a Republic, What, Then, Is Time?, and The Music of the Republic. She also co-translated several Platonic dialogues and received the National Humanities Medal in 2005. Brann passed away in 2024 at the age of 95, leaving behind a lasting legacy of intellectual rigor and philosophical inquiry.