It’s also probably likely that the artists from troubled backgrounds get more press and attention simply because their stories are more interesting. Say you’re a soft-piece journalist/arts writer, and you have to hype two upcoming exhibitions: who’s going to have the more interesting story, a former junkie from a broken home who has schizophrenia or a guy who’s grown up in a comfortable middle-class existence?
First person I thought of when I opened this thread.
I’m pretty sure that Jane Austen’s life was pretty much normal - except for the fact she didn’t get married, which was odd only because of the times she lived in, I suppose. At the very least, I am quite sure she didn’t abuse any substances. 
[Marge]Balzac![/Marge]
Well, remember also that if Shakespeare (not getting into the Oxfordian/Marlovian hooplah but just assuming it was the actual man credited) was sexually abused by both parents and was addicted to powdered mummies and cocaine imported from the New World and three times put in jail for breaking his wife’s jaw for not of ripaste making appropriate the table in a manner most timely, we’d have no idea. We don’t even have any records connecting him to the authorship of his plays from his own lifetime- we have next to no idea whether he was happy, sad, whatever. (We do know he outlived his son and had other personal tragedyes).
I just saw a Larry King retrospective on Don Knotts, who I think most would recognize as a genius. (Think Barney Fife was an easy character to create and play? Try creating some character who is that perfectly realized and consistently hysterical- it’s way harder than playing a straight-man sheriff or a Law & Order detective.) By all accounts he was happy and beloved and a thoroughly positive person. True he was divorced a couple of times, primarily due to his workaholism, but even then he remained good friends with his ex-wives, and also by all accounts was quite the lady’s man. His kids, co-workers, family and friends all seem to have adored him and none seem to have regarded him as tortured.
Thomas Kinkaid?
We know Mozarts personality rather well from the incessant stream of letters and diaries he wrote, and by all accounts he was a kind, generous and cheerful man who loved his wife and kids a great deal, was very happy making good music, and had no more money troubles then most people.
The movie " Amadeus" distorts his personality to make the story more interesting.
Or Kubrick, for that matter? From what I’ve read of him, he seems to have been a pretty well-adjusted, capable individual. I understand that he felt contempt for any artist who was not also a competent businessman.
One wonders if their admirers aren’t using the artist’s messy lives to rationalize their own: "Well, Poe was pretty badly screwed up, and he was a great writer. My life’s pretty screwed up, too. It’s 'cuz I’m so artistic, and bourgeois society has no place for me … "
Me.
Unfortunately, mostly for all of you, I am not going to be appreciated until well after I am dead.
There’s just one thing that’s been bothering me, no-one has mentioned Peter Falk yet.
My first thought, reading the OP was Charles Addams.
I’m surprised that Bertie Wooster, of all people, didn’t mention P. G. Wodehouse. From what I recall of his life story he was a reasonably happy, contented man, even in some less that idyllic situations.
There are a lot of artists who were tortured. There are also a lot who weren’t. The presence or absence of torturing circumstances is not predictive of talent.
<hijack>
As a mental health consumer I have a particular hate for a poster* that one can find in most centers where the treatment of those with mental health problems can be found. It lists a number of famous persons who can be reasonably diagnosed with mental health problems. It includes Abraham Lincoln, several writers, and Emporer Norton I.
:eek:
</hijack>
*The second article touches on the people listed, and their accomplishments.
Reading these responses makes me realize that the definition of “artist” is much wider than most would suspect.
Rockwell wasn’t an artist, he was an illustrator!
:: D&R ::
I took a Japanese literature class not knowing much at all about Japanese literature besides the Tale of Gengi and found out that every single important modernish Japanese author that we studied did himself in one way or another. It got to be kind of funny, really. Particularly when that Dazai guy kept making suicide pacts with girls and they’d die and he’d live. How on earth do you find the next woman to make a suicide pact with once that gets out? And then we get to Ooka Shohei, who wrote Fires on the Plain, informed by his experience of the outright horrors of the Japanese campaign in the Phillipines, who comes home from the war, writes a book, lives happily ever after. So it goes to show you never can tell. Perhaps those other guys didn’t have enough real struggle in their lives, like, I dunno, starving in the Phillipines, so they had to make their own drama?
Tolkien. He created a beautiful myth, several languages, and an entire world; yet he was an incredibly boring university professor. Even fighting in WWI didn’t mess him up. While everyone around him was writing depressing and dull poetry he was inventing Elvish.
Karma will get him yet, you mark my word…
His soul will be tortured later.
Get your tickets now!
It can be difficult to gauge if someone was a tortured soul or not. Some hide it pretty well, some you wouldn’t expect to be under any duress due to wealth, health, stable family, gregariousness, etc. Perhaps the artists listed in this thread really were tortured to some extent or another, thus contributing to their genius, but it wasn’t apparent externally. I’m hardly an artist, but I dabble in a little writing and music and I find a little emotional distress can often add a little something to whatever I’m working on.
Many great SF and fantasy writers have been pretty well-adjusted fellows. Robert Heinlein, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Isaac Asimov – none of them “tortured souls” by any measure.