An award-winning poet and one of the eminent men of letters in his era, Robert Lowell (1917-77) boldly brought his bipolar disorder into the public domain, and in the process created a new and arresting language for madness. In this astute and sympathetic Pulitzer Prize finalist, the author of An Unquiet Mind brings her expertise in mood disorders to bear on Lowell's story, illuminating not only the relationships between mania, depression, and creativity but also how Lowell's illness and treatment influenced his work and made him a more passionate, original observer of the human condition. "Dazzling and deeply moving…. The cost of making art, and how much of it the artist and those around him should have to bear, is the deep subject of Kay Jamison's magnificent study of a brilliant, wounded and lavishly gifted man." —John Banville