Freedom to the Thought that we Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment Anthony Lewis More than any other people on earth, Americans are free to say and write that they think. They can criticize the White House or air the secrets of the bedroom with little fear of punishment. This extraordinary freedom is based on just fourteen words in our Constitution: the free expression clauses of the First Amendment. But the freedom we now take for granted did not take hold when the First Amendment was added to the Constitution in 1791. It was more than a century later, in 1931, when the Supreme Court first enforced the Amendment to protect speakers and the press. Since then judges have interpreted the sweeping language of the First Amendment to build a great structure of American liberty. In Freedom for the Thought that we Hate, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anthony Lewis tells the story of legal and political conflict, hard choices, and determined, sometimes eccentric Americans who led the legal system to realize one of America's great founding ideas. In this, his first book in seventeen years, Anthony Lewis reminds us all that even our most basic freedoms as Americans have been secured through long struggle - by judges, lawyers, activists and ordinary citizens - and should never be taken for granted. Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Anthony Lewis was a columnist for the New York Times op-ed page from 1969 through 2001. In addition to his long and distinguished career with the Times, Mr. Lewis has been a lecturer on law at the Harvard Law School and a visiting professor at the Universities of California, Illinois, Oregon and Arizona, and, since 1983, the James Madison Visiting Professor at Columbia University. His previous three books are Gideon's Trumpet, which has sold nearly a million copies in over forty years in print; Portrait of a Decade and Make No law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.