In Sarah Lewis's own words, The Rise "is about the advantages that come from the improbable ground of creative failure." In her "biography of an idea," Lewis riddles out the gift of failure using narratives of historical figures ranging from writers to entrepreneurs. Lewis writes about the creative failures of Frederick Douglass, Samuel F. B. Morse, and J. K. Rowling, along with those of choreographer Paul Taylor, Nobel Prize–winning physicists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, Arctic explorer Ben Saunders, and psychology professor Angela Duckworth.
