Bozeman, and taught creative writing courses for two years. Shortly thereafter he taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Pirsig's published writing consists most notably of two books. The better known, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, delves into Pirsig's exploration into the nature of quality. Ostensibly a first-person narrative based on a motorcycle trip he and his young son Chris had taken from Minneapolis to San Francisco, it is an exploration of the underlying metaphysics of Western culture. He also gives the reader a short summary of the history of philosophy, including his interpretation of the philosophy of Aristotle as part of an ongoing dispute between universalists, admitting the existence of universals, and the Sophists, opposed by Socrates and his student Plato. Pirsig finds in "Quality" a special significance and common ground between Western and Eastern world views. Pirsig had great difficulty finding a publisher for Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig pitched the idea for his book to 121 different publishers, sending them a cover letter along with two sample pages, with 22 responding favorably. Ultimately, an editor at William Morrow accepted the finished manuscript; when he did, his publisher's internal recommendation stated, "This book is brilliant beyond belief, it is probably a work of genius, and will, I'll wager, attain classic stature." In his book review, George Steiner compared Pirsig's writing to Dostoevsky, Broch, Proust, and Bergson, stating that "the assertion itself is valid ... the analogies with Moby-Dick are patent". Pirsig described the development of his ideas and writing his book in a videotaped lecture that can be viewed on YouTube. The talk was at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design on May 20, 1974. A transcript of this talk also appears as the introduction to On Quality: An Inquiry into Excellence, a 2022 book of Pirsig's unpublished and selected writings. In 1974, Pirsig was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to allow him to write a follow-up, Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (1991), in which he developed a value-based metaphysics, Metaphysics of Quality, that challenges our subject–object view of reality. The second book, this time "the captain" of a sailboat, follows on from where Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance left off. Pirsig was vice-president of the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center from 1973 to 1975 and also served on the board of directors. Personal life Robert Pirsig married Nancy Ann James