Edgar Allan Poe, whose personal torment so powerfully informed his visionary prose and poetry, is a towering figure in the history of American literature. The archetype of the suffering artist, he lived from one extreme to the other: he knew fame and obscurity, wealth and destitution, and the loss of everything he cherished. His fevered imagination brought him to great heights of creativity and the depths of paranoiac despair. Yet although he produced...

Published to coincide with his centennial in May 2001, this definitive biography of a Hollywood icon portrays actor Gary Cooper as a man of complex and sophisticated tastes, as well as large appetites. Meyers offers a riveting, inside look at Cooper's career, his tempestuous relationships with Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, Clara Bow, and Tallulah Bankhead, and his legendary friendship with Ernest Hemingway.

This comprehensive biography of prolific critic, essayist, historian, and novelist Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) posits, quite successfully, that the subject lived a life as romantic and chaotic as his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald's. Wilson suffered a nervous breakdown and the tragic death of his second wife (he was married four times, among them, Mary McCarthy), had affairs with numerous beautiful women, including Edna St. Vincent Millay, and was friend...

Experienced biographer Jeffrey Meyers delves into the complex personal history of the man whose visionary work gave us the great anti-utopias of twentieth-century literature. Meyers draws on a close study of the new edition of Orwell's complete works, interviews with his family and friends, and research into unpublished material in the Orwell Archive in London, to shed new light on this most unusual literary figure. A child of the waning British Empire,...

Humphrey Bogart was the scion of a rich and socially prominent New York family. His father was a surgeon who in later years declined into drug addiction; his mother, a successful portrait painter who used her obedient son as a model. Humphrey was a poor student and welcomed the interruption to his education of World War I. He played dozens of roles in Broadway plays in the 1920s, mostly in short runs, until he created Duke Mantee in The Petrified...