Melissa Block of National Public Radio’s All Things Considered interviews Eric G. Wilson, professor of English at Wake Forest University and author of Against Happiness.

[Wilson] explores the link between sadness, artistic creation and depression — which has led to suicide in many well-known cases: Virginia Woolf, Vincent Van Gogh, Hart Crane and Ernest Hemingway, for instance.

Wilson says perhaps this is “just part of the tragic nature of existence, that sometimes there’s a great price to be paid for great works or beauty, for truth.”

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