Book of Mercy

Leonard Cohen was born and raised in the affluent Westmount district of Montreal and graduated from McGill University in 1955. For a short time, Cohen attended graduate school at Columbia. Throughout the 1960s, Cohen's verse, both as song and poetry, became extremely popular. His "Suzanne" was one of the most-recorded songs of the decade. Always a poet whose work reflected the attitudes of society's nonconformists, Cohen successively identified with the Beat Generation of the 1950s, the rhetoricians of protest of the mid-1960s, and the more meditative disillusionment of the 1970s. Cohen's best-known work, Beautiful Losers (1966), is a dazzling novel that is an abstraction of all searches for a lost innocence. In Death of a Lady's Man (1978), one of Cohen's collections of poetry, his preoccupation with the duality of beauty and decadence is once again explored.