Months before he completed what would become his 1995 award-winning bestseller A Civil Action (and years before it was turned into the hit movie starring John Travolta), Jonathan Harr ran out of money.

So when an editor from the New York Times magazine called and asked him to write a piece for the magazine, Harr leapt at the chance. The story he ended up pursuing was about the improbable discovery in Ireland of a painting by the great Italian Baroque artist Caravaggio that had been missing for 200 years. Harr sensed there was a bigger story to be told and proposed writing a book about it to his agent. Alas, A Civil Action had not yet been published to critical and popular acclaim, and Harr was not famous. His agent told him nobody would give him the money he needed to do the research for the book.

"I just let it go," Harr says during a call to Perugia, Italy, where he has recently completed a course in Italian literature and is now writing short fiction. Harr and his wife live most of the year in Northampton, Massachusetts, but they also have an apartment in Rome. "Rome is noisy and chaotic," Harr says. "It was wonderful when I first got there, but I’m getting a little tired of it. I needed to get out. Perugia is very quiet, very peaceful, very beautiful." After the rebuff from his agent, Harr spent a few years exploring other book ideas another legal book along the lines of A Civil Action, then an archaeological dig on the Syrian-Turkish border. For any number of reasons these projects didn’t pan out, and he eventually returned to his interest in the subject of The Lost Painting.

Lucky for us.

The Lost Painting is an engrossing and exhilarating weave of art history, detective work and human drama. In conversation, Harr says he struggled to bring the threads of this story together. But his struggles will be invisible to most readers. Here, as in A Civil Action, Harr is able to find the right measure of technical detail and emotional conflict to make his intersecting narratives come alive. This is all the more remarkable because the story shifts between modern-day Rome and Dublin, where scholars and art restorers vie to find and authenticate Caravaggio’s painting, and late 16th-century Rome, when Caravaggio walked its streets.

Caravaggio was a violent, temperamental artist who left a vivid trail in police and court records in Rome, died young and somewhat mysteriously in exile, and created some of the most sublimely beautiful paintings of the era. Harr agrees with editors of the British art journal Burlington who assert that Caravaggio is the first realist painter. "A lot of his paintings are religious paintings, although there’s a big debate about how religious he was," Harr says. "I think he wasn’t religious at all. But he painted these religious scenes using everyday people, the clothing that people were dressed in at the time, and he painted them with dramatic intensity, all of which was new. He really invented that dark background with a single source of light outside of the painting. His paintings have a drama and a vividness that nobody before had."

As interesting as Caravaggio’s story is, it actually pales in comparison to the story Harr tells of Francesca Cappelletti, a young Italian art researcher who with her colleague, Laura Testa, made a seemingly small discovery in the dank, poorly kept archives of the once-grand Antici-Mattei family that would prove invaluable to the authentication of Caravaggio’s lost painting called "The Taking of Christ." Francesca was "wonderfully cooperative and open," Harr says. "If she hadn’t been, I simply would have gone on to something else." Harr deploys Francesca’s truly astonishing openness about all aspects of her life to great effect. Through her story, he is able to convey both the intellectual and the emotional importance of what might otherwise seem dry and dusty research.

Far less cooperative was the other main protagonist in Harr’s narrative, an Italian art restorer working at the Irish national gallery named Sergio Benedetti. "A difficult and complicated man," Sergio was the first to suspect that a painting he was asked to examine by Irish Jesuits was an original Caravaggio.

"It was Sergio’s absolute burning desire to climb out of the basement of restoration into something more exalted, into being an art historian, which in Italy is the equivalent of being a doctor or a lawyer," Harr says. Along the way Sergio apparently made some critical misjudgments while restoring the Caravaggio painting. "He’s committed no crime," Harr hastens to add. "He made a mistake due to his own ardor and anxiety, his own desire to see this painting [acknowledged]."

Harr frets that Sergio’s unwillingness to talk openly about his mistake weakens his story. "He’s litigious, too," Harr says, "so I anticipate problems." But in fact, Sergio’s prickly reticence makes for an illuminating contrast with Francesca’s openness. And it allows or forces Harr to write in some detail about the technology and techniques of art restoration, something he does exceptionally well.

"I love the research, love putting things together. It’s like solving a puzzle," Harr says near the end of our conversation. And in The Lost Painting, he delivers an enthralling solution to the 200-year-old puzzle of what happened to Caravaggio’s lost painting.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

Julia Cameron can overlook the fact that author James Frey embellished A Million Little Pieces; what irks her is that Oprah deigned to endorse the now-infamous memoir. "It made me mad at Oprah. I thought it was irresponsible of her to so love an anti-AA book," Cameron says by phone from her home in Manhattan.

"He [Frey] never really got into recovery in the sense of having to do soul-searching, inventory, restitution—any of the parts of rebuilding. It was just like, I stopped using. Isn't it good the storm's over?' Well yes, but it didn't seem to suggest the entire expanse of life that opens up once you get sober. It's not just quitting the drink; it's finding a spiritual path. Once you do that, you can go anywhere."

Cameron knows. She's been there and back: smashed to sober, lost to enlightened, with occasional detours into madness that she now controls with the help of her psychopharmacologist and daily doses of Abilify.

In her candid memoir, Floor Sample, Cameron recounts her steep and frequently harrowing climb out of alcoholism and psychosis and onto a self-styled spiritual path to creativity that she first shared with readers in her 1992 bestseller The Artist's Way.

In the mid-1970s, Cameron was a hot young magazine writer living in Washington, D.C., who modeled herself on hard-drinking literary lionesses Lillian Hellman and Dorothy Parker. One day, Playboy commissioned her to interview a rising young New York director named Martin Scorsese.

"I was at a lunch table at the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis hotel and he walked in, sat down, and I said my God, I've met the man I'm going to marry!" she recalls. "I had never thought about getting married. I had always thought I was going to be a writer so I had pictured a sort of solitary path. But when I met Martin, I just fell totally in love. He was enchanting; he still is."

Marry they did, and in 1976 collaborated on the birth of a daughter, Domenica.

"It was like marrying into a Who's Who, but before they were," Cameron says. "Martin was not yet famous, Steve Spielberg wasn't famous, Robert DeNiro wasn't famous. Everyone became famous simultaneously, so there was no grounding. It was crazy for everybody."

Scorsese's career skyrocketed as a result of Taxi Driver and the newlyweds suddenly became A-listers with unlimited access to excess. The marriage didn't survive the pressures of Scorsese's sudden fame and his wife's growing dependence on alcohol.

"I was what, in retrospect, I call a Cup o' Soup alcoholic; I had a blackout the first time I went drinking and most people don't," she says.

Cameron quit drinking in 1978 and found to her surprise that the good times weren't over but actually just beginning.

"I lost a world but I gained a world. I lost Martin and all of our mutual friends, and for a long time I thought the party had moved on without me. Everyone else kept right on moving at high velocity and I skidded to a halt and said, this has to change or I'm dead."

Adrift as a single mom, Cameron depended on her sober friends for guidance, though she didn't like their suggestions at first. "When I got sober, they said to me, you've got to believe in some positive greater being of some sort, and I said, you don't understand, I was raised Roman Catholic, this is the greased slide to agnosticism. But I started casting around for what I could believe in and I came up with a line from Dylan Thomas: 'The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.' So I crystallized it; I can believe in creative energy."

Spiritual student and creativity teacher, Cameron ping-ponged between Taos, New Mexico, Los Angeles and New York assembling the creative "tool box" that readers know as The Artist's Way. It recommends a simple creative regimen: write three "morning pages" a day on anything to help overcome internal censors, schedule "artist dates" to invite inspiration and let God take care of the quality.

It's a system that has worked for Cameron, who says she's a floor sample of her techniques. She's written 22 books, numerous plays, screenplays, poetry—even musicals guided by the spirit of Richard Rodgers.

"I tell you, he's a taskmaster!" she chuckles. "Today, I was sitting here doing my morning pages and looking for guidance and when I got to the bottom, there it was: 'Julia, I'd like to see you at the piano. There are melodies waiting for you to find them. There is a show I'm ready to write and I need you to cooperate.' His tone is take no prisoners."

But there were dark periods as well, including breakdowns in which Cameron developed an irrational fear of electricity. "I'm always asking, can't I please stop taking drugs? And the answer is, if you stop taking the drug, you probably have two months before you have a breakdown. Then it seems like a small price to pay."

Cameron still remains in touch with Scorsese through Domenica, a writer and filmmaker who is set to direct her first feature film this fall on her dad's home court, New York City. "The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, I guess," says Cameron, who admits she's still " trying to commit" to the city but loves teaching at the Open Center in SoHo.

Despite the dark subject matter of her memoir, Cameron doesn't view her life as a tragedy, but instead a work in progress.

"I once had a girl say to me, 'I admire you so. You've lost everything,' and until she said that, it had never occurred to me. I think I've had some very dark things happen but I think my temperament is the lemonade-making variety. I find when I'm writing I'm pretty cheerful, which may explain why I've been so productive."

Jay MacDonald is a writer in Mississippi.