Genius and Heroin

Why are so many creative geniuses also ruinously self-destructive? Genius and Heroin takes that question seriously enough to catalogue it. From Caravaggio to Jackson Pollock, from Arthur Rimbaud to Jack Kerouac, from Charlie Parker to Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain, Michael Largo chronicles how the notoriously creative lived, worked, and died.

The pattern is old and stubborn. Artists, writers, and musicians across the centuries binged, pill-popped, injected, or poisoned themselves in the service of their art, or at least alongside it. Largo lays out the evidence life by life, in an illustrated catalogue of creativity, obsession, and reckless abandon through the ages, and lets the accumulation make the argument.

Esquire called Largo a curator of death. The Atlanta Journal Constitution went further and crowned him the Capote of kaput. Simon Winchester admired the meticulous, fascinating, and often intriguingly bizarre research. The Los Angeles Times settled for absurdly entertaining, which may be the most honest review of all.

Whether you come for the musicians who died of overdose, the painters who drank themselves out of the canon, or the poets who simply vanished into their habits, the question underneath every page is the same one: what is the price of brilliance, and why do so many pay it in full?