The Anatomy of Melancholy

One of the most astonishing works in English literature, The Anatomy of Melancholy is a sprawling, erudite, and strangely funny meditation on human sadness written by a man who suffered from it his entire life. Robert Burton, an Oxford scholar writing under the pseudonym Democritus Junior, set out to catalogue every aspect of melancholy what we would call depression, but his inquiry ballooned into something far stranger: a 500,000-word labyrinth that swallows history, astronomy, geography, philosophy, and literature whole. The book is both medical treatise and personal confession, scientific inquiry and literary performance. Burton quotes everyone from Aristotle to his own tutors, launches into wild digressions, makes jokes, and openly admits he's writing partly to cure himself. Four centuries later, it remains irresistible: Dr. Johnson reportedly said it was the only book he rose early to read with pleasure, while John Keats called it his favorite book. For readers who want to understand how one brilliant, tortured mind made peace with sorrow through the sheer act of writing about it, there is nothing else like this in all of literature.