The Divine Comedy, completed around 1320, is a supreme work of the imagination. None of Dante's other works, not even all his other works taken together, can rival the Commedia. How did the Florentine exile come to create this masterpiece? What steps in his development can possibly explain the making of this extraordinary poem? Here a preeminent Dante scholar turns to the poet's body of work -- the only real biography of Dante that we have -- to illuminate these questions. Through an exposition of Dante's other writings, Robert Hollander provides a concise intellectual biography of the writer whom many consider the greatest narrative poet of the modern era.