Dante's Invention

The History Behind Dan Brown's Inferno

A biography of Dante from the author of the acclaimed Heloise & Abelard explores Inferno's meaning and how and why it was written, making fascinating companion reading for Dan Brown's forthcoming Inferno The young Dante Alighieri was a love-sick poet who concentrated on writing rarefied, intellectual verse about Beatrice, the girl he had loved since they were both children. He studiously ignored his own innate talent for narrative horror, and behaved as if he was entirely unaware of the increasingly violent political turmoil that had gripped his city. Fate had to work very hard to make him write the Divine Comedy—and this is the story of how it did so. A succession of increasingly painful personal experiences broadened the scope of his vision. When Dante found himself condemned to death in his absence, he could no longer ignore the real world. The result was the epic three-part fantasy that took him the rest of his life to write. Divine Comedy really does deal with life, the universe, and everything, as Dante recounts the story of his fictional travels across the universe, from Hell to Heaven.