Alain De Botton is a writer of essayistic books, which refer both to his own
experiences and ideas - and those of artists, philosophers and thinkers. It's a
style of writing that has been termed a 'philosophy of everyday life.'
His first book, Essays in Love [titled On Love in the US], minutely
analysed the process of falling in and out of love. The style of the book was
unusual, because it mixed elements of a novel together with reflections and
analyses normally found in a piece of non-fiction. It's a book of which many
readers are still fondest.
It was with How Proust can change your Life that de Botton's work
reached an international audience. The book was a particular success in the
United States, where the mixture of an ironic 'self-help' envelope and an
analysis of one of the most revered but unread books in the Western canon
struck a chord. It was followed by The Consolations of Philosophy, to
which it was in many ways an accompaniment. Though sometimes described as works
of popularisation, these two books were at heart attempts to develop original
ideas (about, for example, friendship, art, envy, desire and inadequacy) with
the help of the thoughts from other thinkers. This approach would have been
familiar to writers like Seneca or Montaigne, disappearing only with the
growing professionalisation of scholarship in the 19th century.
De Botton then returned to a more lyrical, personal style of writing. In
The Art of Travel, he looked at themes in the psychology of travel:
how we imagine places before we have seen them, how we remember beautiful
things, what happens to us when we look at deserts, or stay in hotels or go to
the countryside. In Status Anxiety, he examined an almost universal
anxiety that is rarely mentioned directly: the anxiety about what others think
of us; about whether we're judged a success or a failure, a winner or a loser.
De Botton's latest book, The Architecture of Happiness, discusses
questions of beauty and ugliness in architecture. Much of the book was written
at de Botton's home in West London, just near Shepherd's Bush roundabout, one
of the uglier man-made places, which nevertheless provided helpful examples of
how important it is to get architecture right.
Aside from writing, de Botton has been involved in making a number of
television documentaries - and now helps to run a production company, Seneca
Productions.
