The Anatomy of Ambition
How the hunger to rise builds a person up — and hollows them out — from a Scottish castle to the modern world.
- 1 StoryBites Edition Macbeth William Shakespeare Where it begins: a good man who wants one thing too much, and murders to get it. Read →
- 2 StoryBites Edition Julius Caesar William Shakespeare Ambition as politics — men who kill to stop a crown, and the new ambition that rushes into the vacuum. Read →
- 3 StoryBites analysis The Birthmark Nathaniel Hawthorne Ambition turned inward — a scientist who cannot bear a single flaw in the thing he loves. Read →
- 4 StoryBites analysis The Rocking-Horse Winner D. H. Lawrence A child absorbs his family's hunger for money and rides himself to death feeding it. Read →
- 5 StoryBites Edition The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald The American form: a man who reinvents himself completely to reach a green light that keeps receding. Read →
- ✦ Beyond the shelf · Television Breaking Bad The slow-motion version — an ordinary man who learns that ambition, once fed, cannot be switched off.
- ✦ Beyond the shelf · History Napoleon Ambition on the scale of empires: how far the will to rise can carry one person, and where it finally breaks.
- ✦ Beyond the shelf · Psychology Why power corrupts What modern research says happens to empathy and judgment as we actually gain power.