Final Drafts: Suicides of World-Famous Authors [Hardcover]

Mark Seinfelt (Author), Paul West (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1999

Some of the greatest writers in the history of the art-Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Jerzy Kosinski, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Virginia Woolf - all chose to silence themselves by suicide, leaving their families and friends with heartbreak and the world of literature with gaping holes. Their reasons for killing themselves, when known, were varied and, quite often, unreasonable. Some were plagued by depression or self-doubt, and others by frustration and helplessness in a world they could neither change nor tolerate. Profoundly moving and morbidly attractive, "Final Drafts" is a necessary historical record, biographical treatment, and psychological examination of the authors who left this 'cruel world' by their own hands, either instantly or over long periods of relentless self-destructive behaviour. It is also a devoted examination of references to suicide in literature, both by those who took their own lives and those who decided to live.Mark Seinfelt has selected many well-known (mostly fiction) writers, from those whose work dates to over a century ago - when the medical community was ill-equipped to deal with substance abuse and depression - to more recent writers such as Kosinski, Michael Dorris, and Eugene Izzi, who have left a puzzled literary community with a sad legacy. Seinfelt reveals that many authors contemplated ending their lives in their work; were obsessed with destroying themselves; were unable-in the case of the Holocaust-to live with the fact that their contemporaries had been killed; believed death to be a freedom from the horrors that forced them to create; and, sometimes, were simply unable to withstand rejection or criticism of their work.Other noted authors discussed in this volume include John Berryman, Ambrose Bierce, Harry Crosby, John Davidson, William Inge, Randall Jarrell, Arthur Koestler, T.E. Lawrence, Primo Levi, Jack London, Jay Anthony Lukas, Tom McHale, Yukio Mishima, Henry de Montherlant, Seth Morgan, George Sterling, Sara Teasdale, Ernst Toller, John Kennedy Toole, Sergey Yesenin, and many others.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A collection of biographical essays for the morbidly curious, this pedestrian book relates, in term-paper fashion, the lives, works and self-inflicted deaths of about 40 reasonably memorable authors. (The term "author" is employed rather looselyAHitler earns a chapter courtesy of Mein Kampf.) Presented chronologically by year of suicide, the essays begin in 1894 with Henry James's anxious friend Constance Fenimore Woolson and end in 1991 with Polish ?migr? novelist Jerzy Kosinski. Yet, perhaps unwilling to throw away any of his accumulated notes, Seinfelt adds appendixes of "Other Notables," "More Suicides Still" and "Seven Possibles" to the 25 corpses on his main stage, among them Hemingway, Plath and Koestler. The essays include short bios, plot summaries of the authors' works, and the methods of suicide. Unquestionably, Seinfelt has read a great many biographiesAand obituariesAin his research, but he offers nothing factually new. His only message seems to be that writing is dangerous to one's mental health. Nevertheless, readers may find this a handy source for checking their favorite authorial suicidesAas well as an inadvertently amusing collection of clich?s and unintended implications: "He was...one of the least suited writers ever to show up in California," Seinfelt writes of Ross Lockridge, author of Raintree County, "He did not have a thick skin."
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Until the twentieth century, Seinfelt speculates, the "ultimate taboo" against suicide kept many writers who experienced depression and wrote about suicide in their fiction from committing the deed, but, as the taboo has lost its force, all too many twentieth-century writers have ended their own lives. Collected here are brief discussions of more than 50 writers: 25, from Henry James' friend Constance Woolson to Virginia Woolf, Hemingway, Plath, Yukio Mishima, Berryman, Koestler, and Kosinski, are given a thorough discussion; the remainder, which includes Jack London, William Inge, Richard Brautigan, Primo Levi, F. O. Matthiessen, Michael Dorris, and J. Anthony Lukas, are discussed more briefly. A final section, "Seven Possibles," includes Ambrose Bierce, T. E. Lawrence, Randall Jarrell, and Eugene Izzi. There are some surprises among Seinfelt's selections, for example, Hitler, Bruno Bettelheim, and Carole Landis. Ideally, Seinfelt's biographies should send readers back to his subjects' own works. Includes a foreword by Paul West and a thoughtful introduction by the author as well as a brief bibliography. Mary Carroll

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 456 pages
• Publisher: Prometheus Books; 1ST edition (December 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573927414
• ISBN-13: 978-1573927413
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,561,439 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Mark Eric Seinfelt was born on February 27, 1962, in Indiana, Pennsylvania. He attended university and public schools and represented Indiana Area Senior High School at the Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Arts at Bucknell University in the summer of 1979 where he was enrolled in creative writing. In 1983, he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the Pennsylvania State University. He accelerated at Penn State, completing his studies in three years instead of the customary four. A university scholar and honors student in English, he graduated with distinction. His thesis in creative composition, the final requirement in the university scholar honors program, "The Mozart Machine: an excerpt" received the Henry Sams Memorial Award of 1983, the highest honor bestowed on an English Honors thesis at Penn State. As a student at the university, Seinfelt studied under novelist and screenwriter Robert C.S. Downs and critically acclaimed author Paul West, whose awards include the Lannan Prize for Fiction, the Literature Prize of the American Academy, and the designation Chevalier of Arts and Letters from the government of France. Author Thomas Rogers and critic Philip Young sat on the Henry Sams Memorial Award committee judging the honors theses in 1983.

In May of 1987, Seinfelt received a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from Washington University in St. Louis where he was the recipient of a three-year tuition scholarship, fellowship, and teaching assistantship; and where he completed the novel "The Mozart Machine." The chairman of his dissertation committee was the noted fiction writer, philosopher, essayist and multiple National Book Circle Award-winner William H. Gass. Seinfelt's was the only creative writing thesis Gass had ever consented to supervise during his years at Washington University. At St. Louis, Seinfelt also studied under Stanley Elkin, Lee K. Abbot, Donald Finkel, Diane Ackerman, Charles Newman, and Pulitzer Prize winning author and United States Poet Laureate Howard Nemerov.

Since receiving his MFA, Seinfelt has completed four more novels "Henry Boulanger of Mushannon Town," "Steiglitz's Folly," "Intrusive Voices," and "At Last the Distinguished Thing." His fiction has been featured in "Kalliope" and "Chicxculub." In September 1996, a chapter from his suicide-study-in-progress "Final Drafts" was published in "The Bookpress: The Newspaper of the Literary Arts," a Cornell University publication. "Final Drafts" was Seinfelt's first book to reach publication. Acquired by Prometheus Books, it saw print in December 1999. Prometheus is a commercial press specializing in non-fiction and is the publisher of Steve Allen, Peter Ustinov, Leslie Fiedler, and Jack Kevorkian, among others. On January 16, 2000, Seinfelt was the featured guest on Book Gallery, a nationally syndicated radio talk show. Also that year an entry on Seinfelt appeared in "Contemporary Authors," a reference series that provides information on approximately 112,000 writers in a wide range of media, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, journalism, and screenwriting. In February 2004, "Final Drafts" was chosen as an alternate selection of The Readers' Subscription Book Club. In 2008, his novel "Henry Boulanger of Mushannon Town" was a semi-finalist in the Amazon.com Breakthrough Novel Award contest and was subsequently published by the Amazon subsidiary BookSurge/ Create Space. In August 2009 BookSurge/ Create Space also published "Symphonie Fantastique," a collection of his shorter novels.
In May 2010, Seinfelt's novel "Henry Boulanger of Moshannon Town" received a Pinnacle Book Achievement Award from the North American Bookdealers Exchange and will be showcased on NABE's website and at trade book shows beginning in October. For the past twenty-five years, the NABE Pinnacle Awards annually honor top genre books published by independent publishers. In 2008, the book was a semi-finalist in the Amazon.com Breakthrough Novel Award contest.
On January 21, 2011, Mark Seinfelt's new novel "Baldr and Beatrice" was published by CreateSpace. Mark Seinfelt revisits the time-proven formula of girl and boy forever desiring - but never achieving - the culmination of their love in "Baldr and Beatrice".
Seinfelt is single and presently resides in Philipsburg, Pennsylvania, where he serves as a Trustee and Grant Writer for the Philipsburg Historical Foundation and as Secretary for the Committee for a Moshannon Valley Veterans Memorial.
He is an avid reader and sportsman. An amateur pianist, he also enjoys fencing, fishing, hiking, swimming and spelunking.
My website is: www.markseinfelt.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not as depressing as I thought, January 28, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Final Drafts: Suicides of World-Famous Authors (Hardcover)

When I first picked up the book, Final Drafts, I thought it would be a series of depressing tales of writers who led desperate lives, ending them because of hopelessness, drug addition or failure.

Although many fit this criteria, Seinfelt managed to bring out a epathy towards these writers. He also managed to convey the fact that their lives were not wasted or thrown away, but even though wracked by pain, guilt or other strong emotion, many created works of art that endure today. I also got the sense that without their art, these individuals would not have lived as long as they did.

However, this does not pertain to all writers in the book. I felt people like Hitler (even treated unkindly by Seinfelt) and others did not belong in the same book as writers such as Mishima. The largest flaw in the book is that writers like Hitler should have been removed and the book shortened to include mostly writers driven to suicide by mental illness, failure or other cause beyond their control. With some good editing and removing about 150 pages, I would given this book 5 stars.

10 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Eating Cardboard, July 5, 2001

By 

Abe Addamson (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Final Drafts: Suicides of World-Famous Authors (Hardcover)

This book is a collection of tidbits of knowledge that anyone could have put together by simply reading each author's biography. The author's dry, pedantic style is as exciting as eating cardboard, rendering what could have been an interesting book into a simple reference work. This book is simply a reference and a third-hand reference at best, good for writing undergraduate and high school term papers, as little if none of the information seems to come from a primary source. There are no fresh insights, nothing much new here, just the same things one would find in any reference book, and only here they are condensed into a single source. Written like a reference book, the author could have produced the same thing, by cutting and pasting from an encyclopedia

His chapter on Mishma, perhaps the most spectacular suicide of all the writers, is made as dry and boring as reading instructions on how to assemble a child's toy. The author's style is best suited for such or an academic dissertation, something one has to read rather that what someone would read for pleasure or information.

5 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Unique, fascinating, informative reading., April 4, 2000

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Final Drafts: Suicides of World-Famous Authors (Hardcover)

Some of the greatest writers in the world chose an untimelydeath by suicide, and this charts their lives and psychologicalconditions. It's hard to easily categorize this treatise, which considers both their literary lives and their psychology; but any studying such writers from Anne Sexton and Ernest Hemingway to the more modern Michael Dorris, will find Final Draft an important survey covering more than a century of literary figures.