Marcel Proust wrote one novel. It took a transformation from aristocrat to hermit, long nights in a cork-lined room (to drown out the bustling clamor of the Paris boulevards below), and more than ten years to write it. He called his opus, a tomb replete with half-page sentences and sinuous revelation

Aestheticist fiction, Anxiety, Excessive, Layered, Modernist literature, Neurotic, Overflowing, Perverse, Sensual

In July of 1883, an average middle-class Jewish family in an average suburb of Prague (then in Austria) ushered into the average world a new creature: Franz Kafka. He would never forgive them for this unnatural act of torture. Franz kept his neurosis quietly to himself throughout his childhood, r

Absurd, Anxiety, Dreamy, Dystopic, Existentialist literature, Hallucinatory, Hypnotic, Intense, Modernist literature, Neurotic, Profane

American poet Anne Sexton could tell a story that would elicit tears. And yet, her words hold the ring of truth as well as the hollow toll of misery and despair. Just when the sense of her lines seems unbearable, the poetry of them hooks into the reader's veins and persists there. Sexton, a Confessio

Anxiety, Confessional poetry, Dark, Death, Feminine, Melancholy, Moody, Visceral, Women's literature

America's premier poet of twentieth-century theater dominated the stage for almost 20 years. Despite his fall into ignominy and artistic disfavor in the final years of his career, Tennessee Williams is still considered one of the world's finest dramatists. Together with Arthur Miller, Williams pionee

Agitated, Anxiety, Death, Homoerotic, Melancholy, Neurotic, Off-broadway, Post-war theater, Sexy, Southern gothic