Artistic License: Three Centuries of Good Writing and Bad Behavior

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. Her brief but pungent profiles help enrich our understanding of the writers' works.