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Post by gravyboat on Jun 2, 2011 0:57:52 GMT -5
One of the things I love about being an English major is learning about authors, their lives, and their quirks. There are a lot of really crazy stories out there, here are a few that I found to be amusing. -Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was once bored, so he wrote to five of his friends "We have been discovered, flee immediately". One of his friends vanished without a trace. -Hemingway once entered a Hemingway lookalike contest in Key West and came in 2nd place -Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes went to dinner at TS Eliot's house; Plath left the table for a while, and that night Eliot found a used tampon under his pillow, which he subsequently put in an envelope and mailed back to her. -When Joseph Conrad traveled with his family he pretended he didn't know them for the duration of the trip Also a classic, Joyce's infamous letters to his wife, Nora Barnacle, if you haven't read them already. Definitely worth perusing. loveletters.tribe.net/thread/fce72385-b146-4bf2-9d2e-0dfa6ac7142dThere's lots of other fun facts about all those wacky authors we know and love; anyone have anything they'd like to contribute? |
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Post by Silva on Jun 2, 2011 1:00:45 GMT -5
Oscar Wilde's full name is Oscar Fingal O'Flaherty (spelled differently in different sources) Wills Wilde.
I have this memorized.
... and I'll have more when it's not 2 am in the morning.
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Post by onlyaworkingtitle on Jun 2, 2011 1:15:50 GMT -5
And of course NOW is when I blank on all my author trivia. Some history trivia, to make up for it: Queen Catherine the Great once allegedly had sex with a horse.
(I might choose to argue that this counts as English trivia because it's about sex and as every English major knows, what isn't about sex?)
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Post by onlyaworkingtitle on Jun 2, 2011 1:16:05 GMT -5
PS: The correct answer is "nothing."
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Post by Dodger Thirteen on Jun 2, 2011 1:45:44 GMT -5
Apparently Keats and his friend(?) Leigh Hunt were having a dinner party with a bunch of their friends. They invited Wordsworth and Hunt and the gang basically mocked him the whole time.
They also used to have sonnet writing contests.
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Post by gravyboat on Jun 2, 2011 15:06:43 GMT -5
With rising age Tolstoy stopped writing slumping deeper and deeper into his pacifist flavour of christendom. He was found dead in a remote village wearing peasant clothing adorned with a plenty of tiny bells. He wore them to warn "God's beasts" so that he didn't squish anyone by accident.
James Joyce's favorite drink was a particuar white wine that he referred to as "the piss of the archduchess".
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callmeishmael
Young Armadillo
Believe it or not, I use this username on other forums as well.
Posts: 66
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Post by callmeishmael on Jun 2, 2011 15:14:47 GMT -5
Once when Fitzgerald was visiting Hemingway, his daughter needed to use the bathroom, so Hemingway told her that it was on the floor below, and how to get there. Fitzgerald decided this was too far away, and had her pee on the floor in the hallway outside the room.
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Post by nickusp on Jun 2, 2011 15:35:07 GMT -5
A professor once told us the term "keeping up with the Joneses" was coined in reference to Edith Wharton's (nee Jones) family.
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Post by zachary on Jun 14, 2011 16:13:16 GMT -5
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was so obsessed with the supernatural and the occult that when his good friend Harry Houdini told him that all of his magic tricks were just illusions and not real magic Doyle refused to believe him and ended their friendship forever.
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Post by embonpoint on Jun 14, 2011 16:32:38 GMT -5
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was so obsessed with the supernatural and the occult that when his good friend Harry Houdini told him that all of his magic tricks were just illusions and not real magic Doyle refused to believe him and ended their friendship forever. He also believed the Cottingley fairies were real and that the photographs were clear evidence of psychic phenomena. |
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Lilt
Armadillo Pup
Posts: 14
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Post by Lilt on Jun 14, 2011 20:06:30 GMT -5
With rising age Tolstoy stopped writing slumping deeper and deeper into his pacifist flavour of christendom. He was found dead in a remote village wearing peasant clothing adorned with a plenty of tiny bells. He wore them to warn "God's beasts" so that he didn't squish anyone by accident. James Joyce's favorite drink was a particuar white wine that he referred to as "the piss of the archduchess". Tolstoy's was found with just one book at the site of his death: Dostoevsky's The Brother's Karamazov. Tolstoy's post- A Confession ideology professed an abstinence from sex. However, this was especially embarrassing for his wife at the time, because she was preggers. Once, philosopher William James remarked to his novelist brother Henry James of his dialogues that "No one really talks that way in real life." Henry thought for a minute, and responded, "Well, maybe they should." This one probably won't be cool to non-psychos of Russian Lit, but, as most of you probably know, many novels in the 19th century were published serially in magazines, and not as a solid unit. Which is why some books say things like "X: a novel in 5 parts." Anyway, one magazine in Russia was publishing both Tolstoy's War and Peace AND Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment AT THE SAME TIME. Two cornerstones of the Russian canon. I can't even. |
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Post by Eternal Lobster on Jun 19, 2011 20:29:05 GMT -5
A lot of people don't seem to know that Margaret Mitchell (Of Gone with the Wind fame) died at the age of 48. She was crossing the street and was hit by a car. Apparently the driver had been cited before for 23 traffic violations but Mitchell also never looked both ways when she crossed streets. The driver was only in jail for 11 months.
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Post by Sabazius on Jun 20, 2011 6:53:10 GMT -5
While he was studying at Trinity College, Cambridge, Lord Byron had a pet bear. 'nuff said.
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