Literary Lives

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, unauthorised 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), Sorel's 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 protege half her age; Hellman pleading the Fifth in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities; Yeats attending his first seance; Simone de Beauvoir supplying Sartre with her students for his pleasure; Jung cosying up to the Nazis; Mailer's disastrous candidacy for mayor of New York; and Tolstoy setting his peasants free (and they, in turn, refusing to be emancipated).