Author trivia

[Logos]

I always love reading about the lives of authors, what made them tick, what were their weird habits, and what are they most known for now..

For instance, Joseph Sheridan LeFanu (http://www.online-literature.com/lefanu/) that reclusive nocturnal Irish guy who wrote the vampire novella Carmilla (1872) had to have the light of *two* candles to write by.

John Kendrick Bangs (http://www.online-literature.com/john-bangs/) author of House-Boat on the Styx (1896) inspired the term bangsian fantasy for the style of writing fantastic tales of the afterlife.

Please post the bits of trivia you know here :D

[cuppajoe_9]

Those Irish and their vampires...

I've heard Hemingway used to write standing up using his icebox as a desk, and that his private bar was stocked with absinthe and grappa (the latter of which is made from fermented grape stems). Hemingway's Chair, an excelent novel by Michael Palin contains many such pieces of trivia.

[Taliesin]

We have always liked the bit of trivia that when Jevgeni Zamjatin had to emigrate from Soviet Russia, the only one who dared to see him off was Mihhail Bulgakov. Everyone else was too afraid.

[Eagleheart]

An author who dedicates a whole chapter/in a book which you see has to address the essence of the universe/ on how infinetely surprised he was when thinking about a person he wanted to see and by stroke of chance he eventually met, answers the demands of the thread pretty well...I think

/Of course he draws an important conclusion after 30 pages careful analysis on the theme I mentioned-the interrelatedness of elements in the universe/
Oh, the hidden paths of human knowledge

[Idril]

The names of Beren and Luthien, two characters from the Middle-earth mythology who's romance was very star-crossed and endured despite numerous dangers and deaths and the manipulations of her father, are inscribed on the tombstones of J.R.R. Tolkien and his wife, Edith.

[Turk]

Those Irish and their vampires...

I've heard Hemingway used to write standing up using his icebox as a desk, and that his private bar was stocked with absinthe and grappa (the latter of which is made from fermented grape stems). Hemingway's Chair, an excelent novel by Michael Palin contains many such pieces of trivia.

I've heard same thing about Faulkner. I don't believe it though.

Goethe was learnt Persian to read Mawlana Jalal-ad Din Rumi books.

[cuppajoe_9]

I've heard same thing about Faulkner. I don't believe it though.

The icebox or the grappa?

[Mark F.]

Walt Whitman was the only American poet to attend Edgar Allen Poe's funeral.

[mtpspur]

I remember a high school English relating Hemingway standing up while writing also back I believe 7th or 8th grade since that was around the time I read Old Man and the Sea.

[Turk]

The icebox or the grappa?

Writing standing up, plus when he was drunk (i even read some stuff about Faulkner's famous Nobel Prize speak, according to those stuff he was drunken when he did that speak and his relatives hardly convinced him to go to Sweden to get his prize). But you know it may be a urban legend.

Charles Bukowski had hemorroid.

[Nick Rubashov]

Writing standing up, plus when he was drunk (i even read some stuff about Faulkner's famous Nobel Prize speak, according to those stuff he was drunken when he did that speak and his relatives hardly convinced him to go to Sweden to get his prize). But you know it may be a urban legend.

Charles Bukowski had hemorroid.

yeah supposedly Faulkner's nobel prize speech ripped ***. It's great on paper, but I've heard that Faulkner did not like big crowds, had a soft, high-pitched voice, and just couldn't deliver a speech very well. The message of his speech just didn't get through to the crowd when he gave it, and I believe he didn't even want to give one in the first place. Who knows maybe he was drunk lol.

and a couple of fun facts...

To get expelled from west point, Edgar Allen Poe showed up at a military parade dressed in nothing but what the order he recieved told him to, which called for 'white belts and gloves, under arms'. He also dutifully carried his rifle on his shoulder. It worked.

Herman Melville lost his father at an early age, later ran off to sea, and was captured by a tribe of cannibals.

Lord Byron was born with a clubfoot

An obscure poet named Ernest Dowson wrote a poem,'To Cynara,' that contained a line which was used as the title of Gone With The Wind.The line is, 'I have forgot much, Cynara, gone with the wind, flung roses riotously to the throng,'. The heroine of Alice Randall's parodistic, alternative view of Ms. Mitchell's tome, 'The Wind Done Gone,' is named Cynara. Coincidence?

Jack London's epitath reads: "The stone the builders rejected"

most of these came from http://www.funtrivia.com/quizzes/people/writers__authors.html
they might not be true.

[cuppajoe_9]

Writing standing up, plus when he was drunk.

I've actually heard of more than one author who liked to write standing up, and Hemingway was an alcholoic, so it's not inconceivable.

[Logos]

American mystery author Louis Joseph Vance (1879-1933) (http://www.online-literature.com/joseph-vance/) of The Lone Wolf series was alleged to have died from spontaneous human combustion, though it was more likely that his clothes ignited from being cleaned with benzene and he was intoxicated at the time :alien:

http://www3.isrl.uiuc.edu/~unsworth/courses/bestsellers/search.cgi?title=The+Brass+Bowl
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0888539/bio

[Logos]

Walt Whitman was the only American poet to attend Edgar Allen Poe's funeral.

Well, actually.. Poe (http://www.online-literature.com/poe/) was initially buried in an unmarked grave the year of his death in 1849. It was by the efforts of his doting Mother-in-law Maria Clemm and cousin Judge Neilson Poe in the year 1860 that he was given a proper grave marker / monument stone.
http://www.eapoe.org/balt/poegrave.htm

However, that one was destroyed and in 1865 further efforts to bestow proper honours on Baltimore's esteemed poet were started by Miss Sara Sigourney Rice to raise funds to pay for another monument. After a ten year campaign to raise the funds, on 17 November 1875, that monument was placed (where Poe's, Maria's and his wife Victoria's remains have been reinterred together) in a ceremony where Whitman attended. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Lord Alfred Tennyson sent letters to be read at the ceremony. That monument is now known as the "Poe Memorial Grave". http://www.eapoe.org/balt/poegravp.htm

In 1916, another stone was placed near Poe's original burial place, the one with the raven carving and quote:
http://www.eapoe.org/balt/poegravd.htm

So basically Poe has two monument stones in the same cemetery. The Poe Toaster visits every year on his birthday to leave a bottle of cognac and three roses :)

[Logos]

Four-time Pulitzer Prize winning American poet Robert Frost (http://www.online-literature.com/frost/), in one of many attempts to get his high school sweetheart Elinor Miriam White to marry him, had printed two leather-bound gold stamped books of five of his poems, entitled Twilight, one for him and one for her. He then traveled by train to New York from New Hampshire to hand deliver it to her, but it was not favourably received :p though they did end up marrying just months later, in 1895, (http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/frost/life.htm) when she had finished college.
.
.

[Redzeppelin]

Mark Twain was born when Hailey's Comet was in the skies and died 75 years later when it returned.

Can't remember where I heard this one, but it's a favorite to share with my students when the topic of revision comes up. Supposedly, Steinbeck rewrote the final chapter of Mice and Men 99 times to get it right.

Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology outsold every previous volumn of American poetry when it was published in the late 19th early 20th century.

After Steinbeck released the Grapes of Wrath, there was such hostility towards him in certain parts of California that he had to be warned about a trap involving a woman and a motel room in order to frame him. When people questioned the novels horrific depiction of the Depression, the US govenment sent out investigaters who came back saying "Nope - it's worse than Steinbeck wrote."

[Niamh]

J.M.Synges play Deirdre of The Sorrows was never Properly completed as he died before finalising his drafts. The Play as we know it today was put together by lady Gregory, W.B.Yeats and Synges fiance Molly Algood (Maire O'Neill) from his existing drafts and rough notes, producing and publishing the Play one year after his death.

[Scheherazade]

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they burned the copies of Eric Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front because 'it was a betrayal of the German front-line soldier.'

[Logos]

Snopes (http://www.snopes.com/quotes/twain.asp) debunks some interesting "myths" about Mark Twain :D