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 behavior. 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

A rich and subtle analysis of the psychology of friendship and love, Mark Seinfelt's "Baldr and Beatrice"--a novel at turns philosophical, allegorical, mythical and spiritual--revisits the old, time-proven narrative formula of girl and boy forever desiring but never fully achieving the culmination of their love. Here, it is a matter of their accidental disuniting as primordial essences, depicted in grand Miltonic flourishes, through severing time warps and their reemergence in different times, places, and cultures. As the novel opens, in the Upper Circles or the eternal Summerlands, Baldr and Beatrice's spirits, prior to their incarnation on earth, decide to make the happy fall out of the fixed and higher realm to partake directly in the All Highest's continuous act of kaleidoscopic creation and to perform as agents of that creation, something that can occur only in the sublunary world. They chose to take their births in the Langraviate of Thuringia in medieval, semi-pagan Germany. However, a spiteful shadow-being diverts Baldr elsewhere, to indigenous "Indian" America, where he is adopted by the Ho-Chunk deity Red Horn. As a young girl, Beatrice inadvertently summons his unborn soul to her across space and time when she enters a witches' circle cast by her grandmother Oma, who practices the old ways despite the interdiction of her son, the Christian Landgrave. For a time, as children, the spirit boy and the flesh-and-blood girl lead an idyllic existence, but circumstances force Oma to separate them and to send Baldr back to Indian America, where he appears now as a human boy but casts no shadow. As Baldr grows to manhood (generations of Indians live and die in the interval), wave after wave of white settlers begin pouring into the pristine Indian territory. Red Horn realizes that the world is out of balance because of Baldr's separation from Beatrice and aids his son in returning to medieval Thuringia, where tragedy ensues because of Baldr's lack of a shadow. The grotesque admixture of prevailing superstition and custom with new faith is depicted in both European and American spheres in this sad, comic, tears-through-chuckles tale. "Baldr and Beatrice" exemplifies the very best in narrative art, combining wit, imagination, history, and insight into the nature of love, and discloses the influence of such beloved latter-day American authors as Barth, Vonnegut, West, and Pynchon. Indeed Paul West says of "Baldr and Beatrice" "It invokes Thomas Mann and the sermons of John Donne. How does Mr. Seinfelt do it? By keeping it all in his head, as if the whole novel were to come alive again and swamp the remainder? I wish to congratulate the author on the splendiferous plentitude that always keeps itself from excess." Al Galasso of the North American Bookdealers Exchange also hails the novel: "Award-winning author Mark Seinfelt has taken his descriptive talents to an unusual new work entitled 'Baldr and Beatrice.' It takes readers on a time machine into the human psyche."

Four novellas and an appendix of two stories and an essay constitute "Symphonie Fantastique." The titles of the four novelettes are "At Last The Distinguished Thing," "Steiglitz's Folly," "The Mozart Machine," and "Intrusive Voices." "At Last The Distinguished Thing" my title does all the limning and adumbrating I want. The cognoscenti will seize and devour the hint. The elderly gentleman dying in London in February 1916 is not identified by name until mid-point in the novella. Divided into four sections, the novella is told in a variety of voices whose variable visions add up into a harmonious whole. The first part is narrated by the dying writer's valet, a British WW I veteran. The second section is narrated primarily by the writer's amanuensis Theodora Bosanquet. The third section is narrated by the writer's sister-in-law Alice. The final section objectifies the inner struggle of the dying author through the creation of a ghost mechanism. The ghost or "another self" of the author has emerged from the confines of the author's body and is looking down over it. This "other side" has been trying to make its presence known for years. It is the part of the author that has longed for human involvement, a part of his nature he has always repressed. The ghost accuses the author of being for most of his life frosty and dispassionate in his relations with men and women and of becoming as much of a vampire as his old nemesis Richard Wagner. The great friend of the author's youth, a Russian painter, had fallen under the sway of the German. He had been pulled out of the writer's orbit into Wagner's. "Steiglitz's Folly" in the summer of 1973, Franz Steiglitz, a college professor at Slippery Rock University, and his son Billy attend a Civil War reenactment of the first battle of Bull Run near Manassas, Virginia. The battle is being filmed as part of a Civil War documentary. A helicopter filming the reenactment begins to have engine trouble and crashes into the crowd of spectators. Franz Steiglitz, an Austrian American Civil War buff who has written up for his son Billy a collection of tales about the boy's maternal forebears who fought in the Civil War, is killed. The death of his father has a profound effect on Billy Steiglitz. He caves into himself, and, frightened to go outdoors, stays inside his parents' home for the next eighteen years, only emerging after the United States' victory in the first Gulf War. His sense of freedom, however, is short-lived as events conspire against him and he is forced to once again enter a fantasy life. "The Mozart Machine" tells the story of the love affair between a young college student Michael Bolanger, the great-great-great-great grandson of Revolutionary War veteran Henry Boulanger, the eponymous hero of Mark Seinfelt's 2008 novel "Henry Boulanger of Mushannon Town," and Elissa Hexfore, a women seven years his senior. The novelette "Intrusive Voices" is divided into the three sections. The first recounts the last day in the life of bank robber Al Arretto, a thirty-seven-year-old man who is killed in a robbery attempt. The second part takes place five years later and deals with Al's accomplice Harlan Houser, who now works as an aide at the Colonial Court Manor Nursing Home in El Dorado, Pennsylvania, a tiny town adjacent to the city of Altoona. The third section is told from the point of view of Harlan's great-grandfather, a patient at the facility. He recalls a near-death experience he had as a child and, falling into a persistent vegatative state, begins hearing voices of long-dead friends and family members calling out to him. The Appendix features two short stories and an honors essay, "Wagnerian Elements in Thomas Mann's Joseph Tetralogy" by Michael Bolanger, the protagonist of "The Mozart Machine."

The court of Louis XVI continues to exert a powerful pull on the imagination. The dramatic events of Yorktown, the final struggle in America's bid for Independence also remains a subject of fascination. Less known is the story of the Azilum Company, how after the French Revolution, investors purchased large tracts in Pennsylvania and promoted settlements in the hopes of providing a refuge for French emigres. Versailles, Yorktown, Azilum all play a part in Mark Seinfelt's novel "Henry Boulanger of Mushannon Town," which tells the story of a Revolutionary war soldier, who prior to coming to the States, was a travelling shoemaker in Germany and France. The novel resembles Thomas Mann's "Felix Krull" in that it features a rogue hero venturing out from his own nation into two very different worlds. The reader sees how life was lived on both sides of the Atlantic, an old world as debauched as that portrayed in "Barry Lyndon," a new as fierce and untamed as in "The Last of the Mohicans."