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