
by Sylvia Nasar
But at the height of his fame, Nash suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown and began a harrowing descent into insanity, resigning his post at MIT, slipping into a series of bizarre delusions, and eventually becoming a dreamy, ghostlike figure at Princeton, scrawling numerological messages on blackboards. He was all but forgotten by the outside world -- until, remarkably, he emerged from his madness to win world acclaim. A feat of biographical writing,A Beautiful Mindis also a fascinating look at the extraordinary and fragile nature of genius.
Sylvia Nasar is an Uzbek German-born American journalist. She is best known for her biography of John Forbes Nash Jr., *A Beautiful Mind*, for which she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. [*--Wikipedia*](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Nasar) *Photo Attribution:* Knight Foundation, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

by Sylvia Nasar
But at the height of his fame, Nash suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown and began a harrowing descent into insanity, resigning his post at MIT, slipping into a series of bizarre delusions, and eventually becoming a dreamy, ghostlike figure at Princeton, scrawling numerological messages on blackboards. He was all but forgotten by the outside world -- until, remarkably, he emerged from his madness to win world acclaim. A feat of biographical writing,A Beautiful Mindis also a fascinating look at the extraordinary and fragile nature of genius.
Sylvia Nasar is an Uzbek German-born American journalist. She is best known for her biography of John Forbes Nash Jr., *A Beautiful Mind*, for which she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. [*--Wikipedia*](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Nasar) *Photo Attribution:* Knight Foundation, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons