Author Trivia

[baaaaadgoatjoke]

Authors tend to have some pretty interesting things in their past ranging from eccentric to repulsive to comical. I thought it would be fun to have a thread to compile various quirks that may have had a hand in shaping our favorite authors.

I'll start.



There are many stories of Dostoyevsky's father's despotic treatment of his children. After returning home from work, he would take a nap while his children, ordered to keep absolutely silent, stood by their slumbering father in shifts and swatted the flies that came near his head.




She (Wallace's mother) used to fake coughing fits if her children uttered a solecism at dinner, stopping only when they figured out the error and corrected it. Wallace wrote that he was "slightly chilled by the idea of children being brought up to think that a linguistic error might deprive their mother of oxygen."

[MarkBastable]

During the German bombing of London, Evelyn Waugh is reported to have moved his collection of books to the safety of a country retreat but to have left his children in the city, remarking that you can always make more children but books are irreplaceable.


Less apocryphally: when fruit from overseas was incredibly difficult to come by in Britain during the war, a consignment of bananas made it to England from the West Indies, having avoided the bombers and the U-boats that were decimating the Merchant Navy's fleet. Every child in the country was permitted one banana. Waugh took his kids' bananas and ate them, sliced, with custard, whilst the children looked on. His justification was that the children, never having tasted a banana, would not appreciate such a treat, whereas he, a banana enthusiast, would revel in every mouthful.