Acclaimed biographer of James Joyce Edna OBrien has written an intimate biography that suits her fiery and charismatic subject. She follows Byron from the dissipations of Regency London to the wilds of Albania and the Socratic pleasures of Greece and Turkey, culminating in his meteoric rise to fame at the age of twenty-four on the publication of Childe Harold.

With her prismatic eye and novelistic style, OBrien eerily captures the spirit of the man and creates an indelible portrait of Byron that explodes the Romantic myth. From his escapades with John Edleston, the fourteen-year-old Cambridge choir boy, to those with a galaxy of women that included his half-sister, his wife of one year, and the Italian countess who forsook her satyr-like husband for the peer of England and its greatest poet, Byron scandalized the world and inspires Byronmania to this day. Byron, as brilliantly rendered by OBrien, is the poet as rebel, imaginative and lawless, and defiantly immortal.