It's rare that a biographer has a life more interesting than his own subjects, but Lytton Strachey was a biography waiting to happen. The eleventh child of an Indian civil engineer and the essayist Lady Jane Strachey, Lytton went from being a proper history student at Cambridge to living life as a de

Bloomsbury, Clever, Excessive, Glamour, Perverse, Profane

16th century (renaissance) poetry, 17th century literature, Charming, Dramatic, Epic, Excessive, Grand, Pop

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

Unfortunately, little is known about the personal life of Thomas Pynchon, the man behind such innovative texts as "The Crying of Lot 49" (1966) and "Gravity's Rainbow" (1973). Carefully guarding his privacy ever since the 1961 publication of his first novel, "V.," Pynchon has nevertheless dazzled cri

Deconstructive, Excessive, Funny, Manic, Open-ended, Paranoid, Post-war literature, Postmodern fiction, Surreal, Trippy