Literary Lives

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).

Edward Sorel is an internationally known caricaturist and satirist, whose drawings have been exhibited in galleries and museums in Europe and the United States. In 1998, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., exhibited their large collection of his caricatures. Sorel is a regular contributor to the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, and Vanity Fair. Born in the Bronx, he now lives in Harlem with his wife, the writer Nancy Caldwell Sorel.