"Brooke Allen's new collection of essays considers the dysfunctional and apparently destructive nature of great talent." "Ms. Allen goes on to show how the incendiaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were, in real terms, far more daring and more disturbing to the moral and ideological systems of their time than is the modern mutineer, who stages his rebellion within a social framework that condones - or at least pretends to condone - rebellion. In incisive essays, she considers such liberators as Pepys, Sterne, Boswell, Sheridan, Jane Austen, Hans Christian Andersen, Byron, Hawthorne, Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, L. Frank Baum, Sinclair Lewis, and William Saroyan. She finds it surprising that so many writers held on to artistic rectitude in the face of all-but-insuperable personal failings."--BOOK JACKET.