Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley

Richard Kaczynski is a biographer, and this North Atlantic Books volume, in its revised edition, is his biography of Aleister Crowley, widely regarded as the most heavily documented and researched biography of Crowley available, drawing extensively on Crowley's own diaries, correspondence and the records of the organizations he led. Its strength is documentary depth, Kaczynski cross checks Crowley's own often self mythologizing accounts of his life against independent records, correspondence and the testimony of people who actually knew him, rather than repeating Crowley's self presentation uncritically. Its limit is that it is a trade biography rather than an academic monograph situating Crowley within a wider scholarly framework of new religious movements or Western esotericism, so a claim needing that comparative scholarly context needs a source addressing Thelema's place within that broader field.