Artistic Works Inspired By McLean
One popular and anecdotal history of McLean is Alex Beam's Gracefully Insane: Life and Death Inside America's Premier Mental Hospital (ISBN 1-891620-75-4). More factual and scholarly accounts of the history are recorded in the Little and Sutton books listed below. Memoirs of time spent within McLean's walls include Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar and Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted (ISBN 0-679-74604-8), which was made into a movie starring Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie. Samuel Shem's roman à clef Mount Misery tells a story inspired at least in part by the author's experiences at McLean. The 1994 Under Observation: Life Inside A Mental Hospital (ISBN 0-14-025147-2, ISBN 0-395-63413-X) by Lisa Berger and Alexander Vuckovic uses some fictional techniques (composite characters, etc.) to describe some of the typical events at Mclean. James Taylor's "Knockin' 'Round the Zoo" recalls his stay at McLean as a teenager. Douglas S. Holder, who ran poetry groups in inpatient wards for over a decade, published Poems of Boston and Just Beyond: From the Back Bay to the Back Ward. In 2010, Francis de Marneffe, M.D. published his memoirs McLean Hospital: A Personal Memoir about his career-spanning time at McLean, from Residency to Psychiatrist-in-Chief.
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Famous quotes containing the words artistic, works and/or inspired:
“It is the business of thought to define things, to find the boundaries; thought, indeed, is a ceaseless process of definition. It is the business of Art to give things shape. Anyone who takes no delight in the firm outline of an object, or in its essential character, has no artistic sense.... He cannot even be nourished by Art. Like Ephraim, he feeds upon the East wind, which has no boundaries.”
—Vance Palmer (1885–1959)
“Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“Phlegmatic natures can be inspired to enthusiasm only by being made into fanatics.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)