Deranged Minds

The human mind is a place where the greatest creations are made, but also where the darkest abyss hides. Nobody knows this better that artists, a special kind of people who are forced to live with their own visions and views of what we perceive as normal. The line between genius and madness has always been thin and can easily be crossed on the examples of five authors who have struggled with their demons their entire lives. Even though they have created works after which they will be remembered, in the end, they lost the battle and have disappeared in their own madness.
Jack Kerouac-One of the most respected writers of the New Continent, is famous for his cult novel On the Road, which is considered to be the pivotal book of the so called beat generation. Kerouac was a restless spirit who married three times, obsessively wrote and travelled across the USA. He ended his life in Florida in 1969. He arrived there a day earlier due to strong abdominal pain, brought on by internal bleeding and caused by liver cirrhosis. The urban legend states that he wrote On the Road in a three-week long session, with Kerouac not sleeping, but maniacally typing, haunted by amphetamines and vast amounts of coffee. Not to interrupt his writing with placing new sheets of paper, Kerouac thought to type on a large roll of paper, which reeled off over the course of these three weeks as he typed in new lines.
Marcel Proust-Although his novel In Search of Lost Time is one of the most respectable writings of the 20th century, the author himself was a great eccentric. Proust never worked because he had a huge inheritance, but he was troubled by great misfortunes in his personal life. He lost his brother and mother in a short period of time, he had no fulfilled romances and he started pining away towards the end. He had an incredible precision and sensitivity. Proust was a welcome guest in hotels because when he would like to stay in one, he would take five rooms. He would live alone in one of them, while the other four surrounding his would have to be empty in order for the writer to sleep peacefully, without any noise, heard by only him. He never left his bed in the final three years of his life, where he maniacally finished his epic work.
Robert E. Howard-US writer who invented the sword and sorcery genre, and is one of the authors whose work has become more famous than themselves. Howard is Conan the Barbarian`s father, embodied by a California governor on film. He wrote his work for various pulp magazines which boomed during the Great Depression. He suffered from a great depression himself and often contemplated suicide, but he wanted to end his life in a truly morbid fashion. After hearing about his mother being on her death bed, Howard stormed out of the house and got in the car. He took a borrowed gun from the glove compartment and shot himself in the head. Even though his father and a doctor rushed to help him, there was no saving him. He died eight hours later and his mother the next day.
Franz Kafka-The Metamorphosis and The Trial (Process) author lived in Prague, but spent his entire life writing in German. He was so fluent in the language that serves as a nightmare for translators to this very day. Not because of his ungainliness, but the craftsmanship which enabled his sentences to be a page long. His name went down in history and the term Kafkian situation is used today to describe an excruciating and unsolvable situation. Kafka was convinced he was not a good writer and before his death he requested all his work to be burned. He suffered from great depression and migraines his entire life and he tied many cures, including a novelty at the time called vegetarianism. He died of starvation and a poor condition caused by tuberculosis-devastated throat. He foresaw closed and rigid totalitarian systems in his work, which would kill his entire family in concentration camps several decades later.
Edgar Allan Poe-One of the most famous poetry writers, author of the famous The Raven is one of the most influential writers America has ever had. He pursued cryptography, journalism and mysticism. He suffered from depression and manic episodes. Poe foresaw black holes and various physics paradoxes, thus surpassing physicists for a good period of 80 years. His death is one of the most spectacular and mysterious examples in literature. When Poe appeared completely psychically lost in the streets of Baltimore in 1949, he was rushed into hospital. Still, he could not be rescued. What was surprising is that nobody could realise what the famous author died of and speculation included alcohol, a weak heart, cholera and many many others. The popular belief is that he has subcome to an apparition from his obscure stories.