Victor Hugo: The Radical Outlaw Life and Secret Codes of France's Greatest Literary Giant
Victor Hugo wrote Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, but his life was as dramatic as his fiction. He served in the French legislature, went into nineteen years of political exile for oppo...
15 Jun 19min
Thomas Hardy: The Two Burials of a Novelist Whose Heart Ended Up in a Biscuit Tin
Thomas Hardy wrote some of the most devastating novels in the English language — Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure — and then stopped writing fiction entirely after the public backlash again...
15 Jun 24min
Marcel Proust: The Social Climber Who Locked Himself in a Cork-Lined Room and Wrote a Masterpiece
Marcel Proust spent his youth climbing the social ladder of Parisian high society, collecting aristocratic friendships and absorbing every detail of a world that fascinated and repelled him. Then he r...
15 Jun 20min
Herman Melville: The Resurrection of America's Most Neglected Masterpiece
Herman Melville published Moby-Dick in 1851 to devastating reviews and dismal sales. He spent his remaining forty years working as a customs inspector on the New York docks, writing poetry nobody read...
15 Jun 17min
Emily Bronte: The Recluse of Haworth Who Wrote Wuthering Heights and Died at Thirty
Emily Bronte left the Yorkshire moors only a handful of times in her entire life, refused to see a doctor as she was dying, and produced a single novel that remains one of the most ferocious and origi...
15 Jun 23min
Vaslav Nijinsky: The Rebel Dancer Who Redefined Male Ballet and Lost His Mind
Vaslav Nijinsky could leap so high that audiences believed he was defying gravity. He was the most celebrated male dancer of the twentieth century and, for a brief, incandescent period, its most radic...
15 Jun 23min
Miguel de Cervantes: The One-Armed Soldier Who Created the Modern Novel With Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes lost the use of his left hand at the Battle of Lepanto, spent five years as a prisoner of Barbary pirates, failed at every career he attempted, and went to prison for financial irr...
15 Jun 21min
Nikolai Gogol: The Man Who Burned Dead Souls and Starved Himself to Death
Nikolai Gogol wrote Dead Souls — the novel that Nabokov called "the greatest Russian prose masterpiece" — and then burned the manuscript of Part Two in a fit of religious mania ten days before starvin...
15 Jun 25min
