Fragile Brilliance

The Troubled Lives of Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, and Other Great Authors

By: Wallace B. Mendelson MD

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Length: 3 hrs and 30 mins

Publisher's summary

The poet Emily Dickinson rarely left her home after her mid-thirties, and saw few people aside from her father. When visitors came, she was apt to disappear into her room, and those who wished to speak with her did so through a closed door. Rather than interact with neighborhood children, she would send down baskets of gingerbread from her second story window. In 1874, when she was forty-four, her father passed away. The funeral was held in the front room of their home; she did not attend, but listened from her upstairs bedroom. During these years she created some of the most beautiful lyric poetry ever written in America.

In the mid-1860s, around the same time as Dickinson’s growing seclusion, the painter/poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti was living alone in Cheyne Walk, London, where he surrounded himself with peacocks, wombats, kangaroos and other exotic pets. He began to venture out only at night, and also held seances in which he tried to communicate with his dead wife. He began to believe that his eyesight was failing, and thought more and more about his unpublished poems which in a gesture of love he had buried with her. One October night in 1869 the coffin was dug up, the manuscript extracted, and the next year Poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti appeared in print.

When the fifty-year-old Charles Darwin’s monumental book On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, he was away attending to his health at a remote spa in Yorkshire. He had been living for almost two decades in a former parsonage in a small village in Kent. He led an isolated life, avoiding meetings whenever he possibly could, and suffered from gastrointestinal distress, ‘lumbago’ and ‘rheumatism’. He had crying spells, and at other times seemed unable to speak or had mysterious paralyses. He was seen by some of the most prominent doctors of his age, who could never find a specific cause for his various symptoms, until many years later they agreed that he was suffering from angina not long before his death in his early seventies.

These unusual individuals--as well as their contemporaries Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nikolai Gogol--had something in common: they produced a body of extraordinarily creative work while living remarkably troubled lives. In this book, Dr. Wallace Mendelson, Professor of Psychiatry (ret) at the University of Chicago, draws on his experience from more than 40 years of research and practice to explore how this came about.

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