Final Drafts: Suicides of World-Famous Authors

A collection of biographical essays for the morbidly curious, this pedestrian book relates, in term-paper fashion, the lives, works and self-inflicted deaths of about 40 reasonably memorable authors. (The term ""author"" is employed rather loosely--Hitler earns a chapter courtesy of Mein Kampf.) Presented chronologically by year of suicide, the essays begin in 1894 with Henry James's anxious friend Constance Fenimore Woolson and end in 1991 with Polish migr novelist Jerzy Kosinski. Yet, perhaps unwilling to throw away any of his accumulated notes, Seinfelt adds appendixes of ""Other Notables,"" ""More Suicides Still"" and ""Seven Possibles"" to the 25 corpses on his main stage, among them Hemingway, Plath and Koestler. The essays include short bios, plot summaries of the authors' works, and the methods of suicide. Unquestionably, Seinfelt has read a great many biographies--and obituaries--in his research, but he offers nothing factually new. His only message seems to be that writing is dangerous to one's mental health. Nevertheless, readers may find this a handy source for checking their favorite authorial suicides--as well as an inadvertently amusing collection of clich s and unintended implications: ""He was...one of the least suited writers ever to show up in California,"" Seinfelt writes of Ross Lockridge, author of Raintree County, ""He did not have a thick skin.""(Sept.)