The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression is a memoir written by Andrew Solomon and first published under the Scribner imprint of New York's Simon & Schuster publishing house in 2001. There was a later paperback under the Touchstone imprint.
The Noonday Demon examines the personal, cultural, and scientific aspects of depression through Solomon's published interviews with depression sufferers, doctors, research scientists, politicians, and pharmaceutical researchers. It is an outgrowth of Solomon's 1998 New Yorker article on depression.
Solomon's work received positive critical response, being described by the New York Times as "a book of remarkable scope, depth, breadth, and vitality." The book was honored in 2001 with the National Book Award for Nonfiction and the Lambda Literary Award for autobiography or memoir. In 2002 it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction.
Famous quotes containing the words noonday, atlas and/or depression:
“Hush’d in and curtain’d with a blessed dearth
Of all that irk’d her from the hour of birth;
With stillness that is almost Paradise.
Darkness more clear than noonday holdeth her,”
—Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830–1894)
“A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Geez, if I could get through to you, kiddo, that depression is not sobbing and crying and giving vent, it is plain and simple reduction of feeling. Reduction, see? Of all feeling. People who keep stiff upper lips find that it’s damn hard to smile.”
—Judith Guest (b. 1936)