"An enigma of twentieth-century literature - a writer accorded great importance in his time, if less than in his own mind - is here explored by one of our most versatile men of letters, a novelist and biographer ideally suited to the strange case of John O'Hara. What Geoffrey Wolff reveals is not only the hugely complicated man in full but also his rightful place in our contemporary attention - a portrait of the artist that illuminates both the process...

Harry Crosby was the godson of J.P. Morgan, a friend of Ernest Hemingway, and member of the Lost Generation. Living in Paris in the twenties and directing the Black Sun Press, which published James Joyce among others, Crosby was at the center of the wild life, single-minded in his devotion to the creation and destruction inherent in art. Drugs, drink, sex, gambling, the deliberate derangement of the senses in the pursuit of transcendent revelation:...