Edwin Mullhouse : The Life and Death of an American Writer, 1943-54, by Jeffrey Cartwright

This is a witty and elegiac novel in the form of a biography, from a Pulitzer Prize winning author. At the age of 2, Edwin Mullhouse was reciting Shakespeare. At 10, he had written a novel that critics would call a work of undoubted genius. At 11, Edwin Mullhouse was mysteriously dead. Documenting every stage of this brief kife was Jeffrey Cartwright, Edwin's best friend and biographer - and the narrator of this dazzling portrait of the artist as a young child. As Jeffrey follows Edwin through hispre-verbal experiments with language, his infatuations with comic books and the troubled 2nd grade temptress Rose Dorn, and, finally, into the year of his literary glory and untimely demise, Edwin Mullhouse plunges us back into the pleasures and terrors of childhood, even as it plays havoc with our notions of genius and biography.