"The author" is our traditional concept of the lone genius creating a work of literature or other piece of writing by the powers of his/her original imagination.
Imagine the lone genius, sheltered from the storm of short-term commercial demands in a research lab somewhere, whose tinkering produces a sudden and momentous breakthrough.
So I find it difficult to be as romantically attached to the notion of Van Gogh as a 'sensitive, lone genius' as you appear to.
When you imagine inventors, you probably picture a lone genius in a laboratory concocting brilliant devices, experimenting and redesigning until some concept or contraption works perfectly.
It also takes far more people than that lone genius.
Taking into consideration the isolation of Chukotka from the regional centres of civilization, it could be considered a localized creative initiative of a lone genius.
"Community film" proposes that finding answers can be a shared practice rather than the work of a lone genius.
We tell and re-tell stories about successful companies launched in garages by lone geniuses.
He was the lone genius behind the smallpox scare that forced the head of the Center for Disease Control to resign.
At its heart, the research enterprise has always been a social process, despite the myth of the scientist as a lone genius at work in isolation.