Terence McKenna was a psychedelic author, explorer, and showman. He was born in 1946 and grew up in Paonia, Colorado. In high school he moved to Los Altos, California and from there attended U.C. Berkeley for two years before setting off to travel. He travelled widely in Asia, South America, and Euro

Biomorphic, Enigmatic, Experimental, Hallucinatory, Layered, Mythic, Pioneering, Primal, Psychedelic, Spiritual, Trippy

De Sade's writing is the endless elaboration of a single principle: "Virtue is vice, and vice is virtue" -- an incitement to debauchery, depravity, and decadence, and a testament to the value of the animal passions. But de Sade didn't merely celebrate and praise acts of sexual perversion and violence

Agitated, Erotic, Excessive, Literature of transgression, Perverse, Phallic, Primal, Repetitive, Violent

Sylvia Plath, one of the best-known names in American women's literature, signed her first and her last books with pseudonyms. A poet since childhood, she published her debut volume "A Winter Ship" relatively late, in 1960. After studying at Smith College and later at Newnham College in Cambridge (a

Confessional poetry, Death, Feminine, Grotesque, Melancholy, Primal, Voluminous, Women's literature

Enigmatic, magnetic, elusive, and mysterious -- these words and others like them have been employed over the decades to describe actor/playwright Sam Shepard's cryptic persona and plays. After leaving a dead-end town in the middle of a California wasteland, a young Shepard moved to America's biggest

Dystopic, Melancholy, Off-broadway, Primal, Tense, Visceral