Great art comes from great pain.

Or that's the impression left by the haunting profiles in Tortured Artists, which examines the maladies that drive creative types to the brink of despair and the inspired works that are born from their anguish.

The book comprises illuminating profiles of forty-eight celebrated figures from literature, music, drama, and visual art. The artists are a carefully chosen mix of pioneers and mavericks whose creative contributions have forever changed their respective mediums -- everyone from Charles Schulz to Charlie Parker, Michelangelo to Madonna, Andy Warhol to Amy Winehouse. Each profile in Tortured Artists has a specific goal: to show how pain and suffering inspired the subject's art, thereby revealing the common thread that binds artistic expression of every conceivable type.

As much an appreciation of artistic genius as an accessible study of the artistic psyche, Tortured Artists illustrates the surprising extent to which inner and outer turmoil fuel the creative process.