Book description
The enigma of Thomas Chatterton is investigated by Louise J. Kaplan, who untangles the counterfeiter from the artist, the troubled adolescent from the visionary poet, as she recreates the short life of a fatherless boy who found an authentic voice only in the realm of his imaginings.
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Biographers customarily make some psychological observations, but Dr. Kaplan, both author and practicing psychiatrist, had the training and the daring to go further. A suicide at seventeen, Chatterton’s presentation of his own poetry as the creation of an invented 15th-century monk proved his undoing.
Freud’s theory of adolescent development and “Family Romances” guides Dr. Kaplan as she ties the universal patterns of adolescence to Chatterton’s individual needs and drives, analyzing what led him to recklessly defraud the literary public.
From Joel's list on biographies that expand the parameters of biography.
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