The goal of the Handbook of Creativity is to provide the most comprehensive, definitive, and authoritative single-volume review available in the field of creativity. To this end, the book contains 22 chapters covering a wide range of issues and topics in this field.

The chapters are intended to be accessible to all individuals with an interest in creative thinking. Although the authors are leading behavioral scientists and most readers are likely to have an interest in behavioral sciences, those involved in the natural sciences and humanities will find much that appeals to them in the volume, especially because so many of the examples and even case studies draw on the natural sciences and humanities.

The volume is divided into six parts, each dealing with a different aspect of creativity and its investigation. Part I, the introduction, sets out the volume's major themes. It reviews the history of thinking about creativity in general and the field of creativity in particular. Part II characterizes some of the main ways in which creativity can be investigated. Part III looks at how creativity originates and develops, both over the course of historical time and over the course of an individual's life span. Part IV considers the relation between the self and the environment in the nature and development of creativity. Part V deals with a wide variety of topics in the study of creativity that are outside the mainstream but that are nevertheless important to the field.