Author Description

As David Crane writes in Lord Byron's Jackal, "It is given to few men to kill two major poets." As a hanger-on of the Romantics, Edward Trelawny designed a boat for Percy Bysshe Shelley that immediately sank and drowned him, and accompanied Lord Byron to Greece, where he abandoned him to doctors of such incompetence that the poet soon died. Trelawny's life was characterized by violence and hyperbole. He managed to bluff his way into the literary circle of the Romantics in Pisa. After Shelley's death, Trelawny and Byron set off to the war in Greece, where Trelawny prowled the mountains and watched the fighting while Byron was dying of fever.Trelawny spent the next 50 years chronicling these hair-raising events, making a living from the exaggerations of his memoirs and carving his own place in history as the most daring of the Romantic figures.