Secret Lives of Great Authors: What Your Teachers Never Told You about Famous Novelists, Poets, and Playwrights - Softcover

Robert Schnakenberg

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1594742111 ISBN 13: 9781594742118

Publisher: Quirk Books, 2008

Synopsis

The strange-but-true tales of the rumors, idiosyncrasies, and feuds of literary legends—including Agatha Christie, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Shakespeare, and more

This fascinating—and shocking!—tour through the lives of classic literature icons is the perfect stocking stuffer for book lovers and fans of little-known history.
 
With outrageous and uncensored profiles of everyone from William Shakespeare to Thomas Pynchon, Secret Lives of Great Authors tackles all the tough questions your high school teachers were afraid to ask: What’s the deal with Lewis Carroll and little girls? Is it true that J. D. Salinger drank his own urine? How many women—and men—did Lord Byron actually sleep with? And why was Ayn Rand such a big fan of Charlie’s Angels? Classic literature was never this much fun in school!

Authors included:
William Shakespeare
Lord Byron
Honoré de Balzac
Edgar Allan Poe
Charles Dickens
The Brontë Sisters
Henry David Thoreau
Walt Whitman
Leo Tolstoy
Emily Dickinson
Lewis Carroll
Louisa May Alcott
Mark Twain
Oscar Wilde
Arthur Conan Doyle
W.B. Yeats
H.G. Wells
Gertrude Stein
Jack London
Virginia Woolf
James Joyce
Franz Kafka
T.S. Eliot
Agatha Christie
J.R.R. Tolkien
F. Scott Fitzgerald
William Faulkner
Ernest Hemingway
Ayn Rand
Jean-Paul Sartre
Richard Wright
William Burroughs
Carson McCullers
J.D. Salinger
Jack Kerouac
Kurt Vonnegut
Toni Morrison
Sylvia Plath
Thomas Pynchon

About this title

About the Author

Robert Schnakenberg is the author of several nonfiction books including Distory: A Treasury of Historical Insults. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. 

Reviews

Adult/High School—Schnakenberg packages the lives and loves of 41 famous writers into a supermarket-tabloid parody. All rumors, idiosyncrasies, feuds, etc., are fodder for laughs or sarcastic jeers; no event is so tragic as to be exempt. Each biography starts with birth/death dates, nationality, astrological sign, major works, contemporaries and rivals, literary style, and words of wisdom. Because Emily Dickinson wrote her poems in iambic tetrameter, they can be sung to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas." She may have been a closet lesbian, but was definitely a Sagittarius. J. R. R. Tolkien (Capricorn) was one of the original translators of the Old Testament Books of Jonah and Job of the Jerusalem Bible and also snored so loudly that he was relegated to the bathroom to sleep while his wife remained in the bedroom. Agatha Christie, a Virgo, had a disability called dysgraphia and had to dictate all of her writing. Also, both of her husbands cheated on her. Schnakenberg compares F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald to P. Diddy and Lindsay Lohan as King and Queen of the celebrity party circuit, "astounding guests with their outrageous, drunken behavior." He cites Hemingway and Fitzgerald as the Oscar and Felix of America's Lost Generation. Thanks to modern headlines and reality TV, nothing here is particularly shocking, but the author does show that celebrity is celebrity no matter when it occurs. All readers will find at least a few "you have to hear this" tidbits.—Dana Cobern-Kullman, Luther Burbank Middle School, Burbank, CA
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Edition details

• Publisher: Quirk Books
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1594742111
• ISBN 13: 9781594742118
• Binding: Paperback
• Illustrator: Mario Zucca
• Number of pages: 304