Literary Lives

About this book

Award-winning caricaturist Edward Sorel uses his distinctive style to illustrate the strange and eccentric lives of ten iconic literary figures. Literary Lives features the brief unauthorized biographies of ten larger-than-life literary figures: Tolstoy Sartre Eliot Proust Yeats Brecht Jung Rand Mailer and Hellman. Amusing and sometimes hard to believe (but always absolutely true) Sorels vignettes depict among other sparkling moments Proust investing in a male brothel so he can peep at its clientele through a keyhole; Rand launching a torrid affair with a protg half her age; Hellman pleading the Fifth in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities; Yeats attending his first sance; Simone de Beauvoir supplying Sartre with her students for his pleasure; Jung cozying up with the Nazis; Norman Mailers disastrous candidacy for Mayor of New York; and Tolstoy setting his peasants free (and they in turn refusing to be emancipated).