Short Lives: Portraits of Writers, Painters, Poets, Actors, Musicians and Performers in Pursuit of Death

by Katinka Matson

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 033026219X
• Release Date: January 1981
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Length: 284 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Those who died before it was time

Matson writes about creative people: artists, poets, writers, musicians and actors, whose creativity seemed to embody the pursuit of self-destruction and death. The list is long and interesting, and includes inter alia the following: Antonin Artaud, Lenny Bruce, Montgomery Clift, Hart Crane, Stephen Crane, James Dean, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Judy Garland, Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, Jack Kerouac, Yukio Mishima, Amedeo Modigliani, Marilyn Monroe, Vaslav Nijinsky, Sylvia Plath, Edgar Allan Poe, Elvis Presley, Arthur Rimbaud, Anne Sexton, Dylan Thomas and Vincent van Gogh. The epilogue is dedicated to Thomas `Tyler' Bootman, with whom the author spent 13 years and who died at age 36. Short Lives was inspired by his life and death, a story eerily similar to the lives of the famous dealth with here. Every individual's story - all of them cult heroes - is told compellingly by Matson, with a wealth of black and white photographs; each chapter concludes with a list of sources by and about them. I loved especially the poignant photographs of Billie Holiday, Anne Sexton, Elvis and Jack Kerouac. The text is enhanced by quotations from the press or from those near the artists discussed, and sometimes by their own quotes or quotes from their work. An extensive bibliography is found under the "Acknowledgements" section. This is a valuable and insightful work. I do think, however, that Matson could have made the work even more scholarly by adding a chapter discussing the general phenomenon of the artist-who-dies-young from a psychological perspective. An updated, second edition of this book would be more than welcome, and ought to include people like Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, River Phoenix and others.