This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity

Title: This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity

Author: Richard Deming

Publisher: Viking Press

Publication Year: 2023

ISBN: 9780593492512

In This Exquisite Loneliness, Richard Deming turns an eye toward that unwelcome feeling, both in his own experiences and the lives of six groundbreaking figures, to find the context of loneliness and to see what some people have done to navigate this profound sense of discomfort. Within the back stories to Melanie Klein’s contributions to psychoanalysis, Zora Neale Hurston’s literary and ethnographic writing, the philosophical essays of Walter Benjamin, Walker Evans’s photography of urban alienation, Egon Schiele’s revolutionary artwork and Rod Serling’s uncanny narratives in The Twilight Zone, Deming explores how loneliness has served as fuel for an intense creative desire that has forged some of the most original and innovative art and writing of the twentieth century.