Arthur Rimbaud

Vagabond poet Arthur Rimbaud is often held up as one of history’s few examples of a literary prodigy. An award-winning student, the Frenchman published his first work in 1870 at the age of 15 before running away to Paris and making his name as a writer and rabble-rouser. Rimbaud produced his early masterpiece “The Drunken Boat” when he was just 16. He followed it up three years later with “A Season in Hell,” a hallucinatory prose poem that helped set the stage for the surrealist movement. Along the way, he engaged in a drug and alcohol-fueled love affair with fellow poet Paul Verlaine and won plaudits from the likes of Victor Hugo, who supposedly dubbed him “an infant Shakespeare.” While Rimbaud’s work would later influence Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan and many others, the teen phenom stopped writing altogether at age 20. He later roamed through the Middle East and Africa and worked as a trader and gunrunner before dying from cancer at age 37.