The man who invented the television talk show surpassed even himself when he created Meeting of Minds , the award-winning series that captured America’s imagination. These four volumes offer the original scripts from the series, including material edited from the broadcast versions that ran from 1977 to 1981 on PBS stations nation-wide. Indeed, Meeting of Minds grew out of Allen’s frustration with the mediocrity of the average network program. He envisioned the show as a stimulating round-table discussion conducted like any other talk show - except that the participants would be actors portraying some of the greatest minds and most prominent figures of history. Accordingly, such characters as Aristotle, Catherine the Great, Oliver Cromwell, Emily Dickinson, Margaret Sanger, Gandhi, Thomas Paine, Cleopatra, Theodore Roosevelt, and St. Thomas Aquinas appear in startlingly effective juxtaposition, their characters revealed through brilliantly conceived dialogue.