“Nobody else suspected he was going crazy,” reﬂects Billy
Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5. “Now he was in the
hospital. The doctors agreed: He was going crazy.” As Billy
gradually manifests the classic symptoms of full-blown post-
traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Vonnegut’s novel takes us deep
inside a disordered mind. If the best nonﬁction, including “The
Great Brain Books” (Cerebrum, Spring 1999), can inform and
inspire, great ﬁction can recreate for us the experience of
madness. With the generous help of scientists, scholars, and
editors, we have culled a baker’s dozen of the most compelling
novels, short stories, and ﬁctionalized memoirs of the past 200
years that create characters with what (at least in retrospect)
we can identify as brain disorders. We particularly thank
Richard Restak, M.D., for many helpful insights and suggestions
relating to the literary selections and the brain disorders
discussed in this article. Some authors write from direct
personal experience: Fyodor Dostoevsky of