Artistic License: Three Centuries of Good Writing and Bad Behavior

by Brooke Allen

Brooke Allen's sparkling new collection of essays considers the dysfunctional and apparently destructive nature of great talent. Ms. Allen shows how the incendiaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were, in real terms, far more daring and more disturbing to the moral and ideological systems of their time than is the modern mutineer, who stages his rebellion within a social framework that condones—or at least pretends to condone—rebellion. She finds it surprising that so many writers held on to artistic rectitude in the face of all-but-insuperable personal failings.

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Brooke Allen's critical writings appear frequently in the New York Times Book Review, the Atlantic Monthly, The New Criterion, The Hudson Review, and The Nation. Her Twentieth-Century Attitudes was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her most recent book is Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers."