As implied by the prefix "bio," biographies deal with our lives' stages of birth, childhood, education, relationships, career ups and downs, the infirmities of old age, and death. This collection of short biographies advances the theme of genius being close to madness.

None of the people featured in these pages enjoyed carefree lives. Well-educated Homer and Langley Collyer inexplicably turned into neurotic recluses who collected and hoarded junk. Obsessive writer Joe Gould sunk into alcoholism, became a derelict, and died in an insane asylum. Though Valerie Solanas graduated cum laude from the University of Maryland with a degree in psychology, she drifted into drug addiction and prostitution.

19th century critics denounced Theosophical Society founder Helena P. Blavatsky as a fraud, and condemned poet Walt Whitman for being a nonconformist. Matt Talbot transformed himself from fall-down drunk to candidate for sainthood. Rose Hawthorne was traumatized by the deaths of her parents, sister Una, and son Francis. After two decades of marriage, she separated from her alcoholic husband, and established an order of nursing nuns which ministered to impoverished cancer patients.

This work attempts to explain why some of these temperamental individuals came to grief, and others triumphed over adversity.