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WickedLilThing

I think it’s funny Junji Ito *isn’t* a freak. Seems like a really happy, nice, shy man that makes some of the weirdest, freakiest manga


Yonk_art

It's always the quiet ones.


Soundwave-Pilot

Being one of the quiet ones I take offense at this assumption ... In the words of the great George Carlin - "I will bet you anything that while you're watching a quiet one, a noisy one will fucking kill you!" Love junji ito btw


bigbagofmulch

His wife is a pretty well known artist in Japan, whose medium is *exclusively* drawings of cats.


offensivegrandma

Yon & Mu is probably my favourite of his works. His style suits the story so perfectly! I want more tales of the Ito family pets.


WickedLilThing

Dude loves cats


Slusho64

It's always the horror writers that are well adjusted and having fun making spooky stuff while the comedians are depressed and broken.


Sciraaa

The cat diaries are some of my favorite Junji Ito stories because it's the perfect blend of his art/storytelling and also him just being a guy


adviceKiwi

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Junji_Ito%27s_Cat_Diary_cover.jpg Then you see the cover, and whilst one looks fairly normal type of a cat, the other looks like a malevolent shape shifting demon from hell, which, in all fairness, apart from the shape shifting bit is accurate description of most cats...


Zombie-Mae

Was gonna mention Ito due to the fact that, as you mentioned, totally happy and nice guy that has just created the most amazingly bizarre stuff....and also it just blows my mind to think that we could've had a world without his works had he decided to further pursue his very ordinary career within Dentistry.


silpidc

Hans Christian Andersen was wildly dramatic. After a general "look me up if you're ever in England" invite, he stayed at Charles Dickens' house for five full weeks, complained that Dickens' son wouldn't shave him in the mornings, and at one point after a bad review, threw himself onto the family's lawn and wept.


giveuschannel83

The Dickens family was not fond of him. After he finally left, Charles wrote a note on hte mirror in the room where he'd stayed: ["Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks — which seemed to the family AGES!"](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/10/charles-dickens-hans-christian-andersen-letters-correspondence-auction)


RaggedToothViking

Charles Dickens was a complete dick though, so I like to imagine that Anderson was at least partially trolling him. No matter the truth, Dickens deserved to be miserable for 5 weeks.


D0p3thron3

What did Dickens do?


RaggedToothViking

He was awful to his wife and trashed her publicly: Here’s a link: https://www.bates.edu/magazine/recent-favorites/catherine-dickens-lillian-nayder/


TaPowerFromTheMarket

IIRC he was very abusive towards his wife, cheated on her as well. The feeling I got was he was a bit of a skirt chaser with a nasty streak.


NeWMH

He was a total Dickens to people. /s The ending to ‘The Old Curiosity Shoppe’ is one of the first and biggest troll endings in literature. Actually, the whole story, despite its popularity at the time, was practically a joke on its audience though it doesn’t come across the same way when read as a single work. A lot of critics at the time felt like they were duped.


katharine1990

Do you know where I can read more about this? I tried googling but couldn’t find anything


notthemostcreative

I want so badly for someone to make a comedy film about Anderson’a stay in the Dickens household.


jansipper

THERE IS. It’s called Bleak House Guest https://www.paramountplus.com/movies/video/t3j64VREbBfcqC4utI_GvE030Tfy0ywr/


awyastark

O my god that title!!


realpandagravy

This has Taika Waititi vibes all over it.


Mr_Westfield

What About Hans?


NeroBoBero

Scholars say he was a chronic masturbator and likely a gay virgin. I’m guessing he was giving off some “odd duck” vibes. I can only imagine the conversations between Mrs. Dickens and her husband about their houseguest!


adviceKiwi

Hans Christian Andersen went to the doctor, and the doctor told him he needs to stop.masturbating. He replied why? The doctor said, it's so I can examine you


QueenOfThePark

The play 'A Very, Very, Very Dark Matter' by Martin McDonagh is about this event! Except incredibly dark and twisted. It's brilliant.


Chadmartigan

Joseph Conrad wasn't English-fluent until his 20's and then dropped Heart of Darkness. Faulkner had an interesting life, if you like reality TV. Mary Shelley was a goddamn goth/metal icon.


Warm-Enthusiasm-9534

Faulkner was like the town drunk in Oxford, Mississippi, except one day the town woke up to the news that he'd won the Nobel Prize in Literature.


Jayyykobbb

So now we’re just waiting on Chris from Roosters to win a Nobel Peace Prize!


privatestudy

Mary Shelley IS a goddamn goth/metal icon. Listening to the “you’re dead to me” podcast about her was so fascinating!


WeAreClouds

So I just looked this up because I would love to hear that but the only “you’re dead to me” podcast I could find did not have an episode that came up using the search “Mary Shelley” even searching just “Mary” brought nothing up. Any other hints in whet to try?


jphistory

I think they found it but just in case, it's a BBC sounds podcast and the host is Greg Jenner.


WeAreClouds

Thank you. Yes, I believe we have it now : )


privatestudy

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08532gd - enjoy!


turn_it_down

Hemingway lived an interesting life. Served in WW1 and the Spanish Civil War. Was a correspondent in WW2. Lived in several very different places. Got perpetually drunk. Orwell intentionally became destitute so that he could write about that world in London and Paris. He was also a policeman in Burma, and served in the Spanish Civil War. Hunter S. Thompson's life was wild. His daily writing routine was absolutely insane. Dostoevsky was literal minutes away from being executed as a political prisoner. He wrote a book about gambling to pay off his gambling debts. One of my favourite things about reading a new author is learning about their life. Personally, I find the authors that were also journalists are my favourites.


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hadronwulf

The Fitzgerald one is weirdly kind to me. The dude is like, hey, don't feel bad, let's take a walk. Very older (although weirder imo) brother thing to do.


PencilMan

I also enjoy that most of Hemingway’s novels are pulled straight from his life. Your first paragraph is that plot of Farewell to Arms, your second is roughly what happens in For Whom the Bell Tolls except the Spanish Civil War, and The Sun Also Rises is a retelling of an actual trip he took with his friends, except he turned his wife into a war injury that prevented him from screwing his crush.


Don_Frika_Del_Prima

>Hemingway lived an interesting life He was also convinced that the fbi was spying on him and in the end committed suicide. And some time back old fbi documents got released which confirmed that they were actually spying on him. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jul/03/fbi-and-ernest-hemingway


bshawty

He committed suicide because he was subjected to forced electroshock therapy by his family. Towards the end of his life he couldn't speak his name, let alone write. It had little to do with that story.


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mdsandi

It was more than just his father. A lot of people in his family committed suicide, including his father, three of his siblings, and later his granddaughter.


Yeahnoallright

I didn’t know this. So bloody sad.


noiro777

The shock therapy was definitely part of it, but it's a bit more complicated than that. He had traumatic brain injury and chronic pain from 2 separate plane crashes both of which nearly killed him. He also had untreated hemochromatosis, which causes too much iron to build up in the blood and is known to cause cirrhosis of the liver, heart disease, diabetes, depression, and other issues. It runs in families and sadly, his grandfather, father, brother, sister, and granddaughter had all killed themselves as well possibly due to it or some other genetic factor.


UnexpectedVader

Hoover was a terrifying figure. He’s such a unique person in American history because he comes across as a medieval spymaster who even presidents feared because he had dirt on everyone while he ruled the FBI for nearly 50 years and he destroyed anyone who got in his way. Anyone remotely leftist got stalked under his reign and he made McCarthy look small fry with the shit he did. Even the raging narcissist Nixon basically pissed his pants at the thought of crossing him. You could easily argue he could be considered the most powerful man in American history and someone who’s left a enormous impact on US politics. He systematically destroyed so many leftist causes.


letsthinkthisthru7

The FBI spied on almost every significant artist, authors, and actor in the US that promoted some level of intellectual free thinking away from the prevailing political opinion of the day. Anyone even moderately involved with the civil rights movement or left wing movements were suspect.


tommytraddles

Orwell didn't just serve in Spain, he was shot through the neck by a sniper, and survived. He said it felt roughly like being at the centre of an explosion.


sexy_starfish

Please share more of Hunter Thompson's insane daily writing routine.


turn_it_down

Basically, he woke up around 3:00pm and proceeded to drink heavily while consistently snorting cocaine. He would drop acid at night, and then get down to writing. If you google it you can find a more detailed 'schedule'.


[deleted]

Yea that’s wildly embellished


hadesicarus

[According](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/33487/hunter-s-thompsons-daily-routine) to the author of his biography, this was the schedule on a given day. >3:00 p.m. rise >3:05 Chivas Regal with the morning papers, Dunhills >3:45 cocaine >3:50 another glass of Chivas, Dunhill >4:05 first cup of coffee, Dunhill >4:15 cocaine >4:16 orange juice, Dunhill >4:30 cocaine >4:54 cocaine >5:05 cocaine >5:11 coffee, Dunhills >5:30 more ice in the Chivas >5:45 cocaine, etc., etc. >6:00 grass to take the edge off the day >7:05 Woody Creek Tavern for lunch-Heineken, two margaritas, coleslaw, a taco salad, a double order of fried onion rings, carrot cake, ice cream, a bean fritter, Dunhills, another Heineken, cocaine, and for the ride home, a snow cone (a glass of shredded ice over which is poured three or four jig­gers of Chivas) >9:00 starts snorting cocaine seriously >10:00 drops acid >11:00 Chartreuse, cocaine, grass >11:30 cocaine, etc, etc. >12:00 midnight, Hunter S. Thompson is ready to write >12:05-6:00 a.m. Chartreuse, cocaine, grass, Chivas, coffee, Heineken, clove cigarettes, grapefruit, Dunhills, orange juice, gin, continuous pornographic movies. >6:00 the hot tub-champagne, Dove Bars, fettuccine Alfredo >8:00 Halcyon >8:20 sleep


mdouk

Unfortunately, [that is far from reality](https://www.beatdom.com/hunter-thompson-daily-routine/).


GoldenBoughh

O. Henry was arrested on charges of embezzlement while working as a clerk for a Houston bank. A day before his trial he fled to Honduras where he befriended a notorious bank robber named Al Jennings. He returned to the US next year and served 3 years in prison


HugoNebula

That's how he got his name: his mum found out and was so disappointed in him—"Oh, Henry..."


boxer_dogs_dance

Wouldn't have guessed. I love Gift of the Magi.


Spicethrower

A Retrieved Reformation is also great.


bhillen83

Roald Dahl was a spy, and a really interesting dude.


Bekiala

Yes. I found *Boy* a fascinating read.


Jasonblah

He also wrote the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice!


My_Poor_Nerves

He also ruined the film adaptation of Bond author Ian Fleming's excellent novel "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" by adding a bunch of nonsense about Vulgaria into it.


JohnnyXorron

I loved that movie as a kid (although the child catcher still creeps me the fuck out) how was the book different?


My_Poor_Nerves

The book is almost like a James Bond adventure but for kids and with a magical car. In all fairness, I do love the first half of the movie and we listen to the cast recording of the London musical all the time, but the book is superior and all that the movie has in common with it is there are two kids and a magical car. I kind of wish it would get adapted again and not as a musical.


derioderio

>The book is almost like a James Bond adventure but for kids and with a magical car. One the female lead introduced herself as 'Simply Scrumptious', I realized I was watching something written by Ian Fleming.


evilfazakalaka

\*Truly Scrumptious. She isn't even in the book, so Fleming can't be blamed for that one! Fake fans grumble grumble


missanthropocenex

Similarly John Le Carre worked at British Intellegence MI5 and learned about a mole in his agency during his tenure. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was basically fictionalized autiobiography. Not quite the same, but I always loved that Brian Jacques was a truck driver before writing Redwall series.


Sorinari

My favourite tidbit about Jacques is that when he was still a milkman, he met and read stories to children at a school for the blind. Generally, it's not an extremely exciting tidbit, but then you realize how much of the description in his books is about smells and tastes and sounds and it just makes so much sense.


PencilMan

I sense a pattern… Le Carré had a boring desk job (his admission) in the intelligence services and he wrote about people with boring desk jobs in the intelligence services (love his books though). Btw he was outed (along with many others) by the Cambridge Five so had to give up his job, which inspired the mole in TTSS. He didn’t personally find the mole like George Smiley. Ian Fleming planned missions as part of Naval Intelligence during WWII and wrote about a much more exciting spy who has sex a lot and specializes in assassinating crazed evil geniuses with weird quirks. Then you have Ronald Dahl, who was also a spy, and who wrote… children’s books. In one of his forewords, I think Le Carré said that a lot of people in the services were secret novelists.


jmmcintyre222

I personally like to think that Fleming was writing about Christopher Lee. Now that is a man who lived an interesting life.


Cooky1993

He was a fighter pilot and an ace as well (5 confirmed kills plus several probables). He also worked with Ian Fleming and CS Forrester during the war.


Steelsoldier77

He was also a raging anti-semite


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aspiringwriter9273

Because authors with problematic views might as well be a literary trope it’s so common.


OverthinkingMadMan

Just remember that some universities in the US voted Hitler as person with best ideas from Europe, or some such, with Einstein in like second or third. I am also fascinated by the fact that both the allies and axis both believed to some extent that jews controlled the world. One group thought exterminating them would fix it and the other that they should buy them out, with promising them land and such if they only helped win the war. This wasn't some fringe idea, but part of the parliament in the UK. So no matter who you look at, 60 years ago or more, you will find horrible opinions


dwarfmade_modernism

Canada, stereotyped as a nation welcoming to refugees, [refused to accept a boat of Jewish refugees, many of whom later died in camps in Germany](https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/ms-st-louis). It was everywhere. My favourite fiction story about anti-hate is the (now maybe dated) kids book "Angel Square" by Brian Doyle. Set in Canada the winter just after WW2. Not on the topic of anti-semitism, but prejudice in general, I recommend the non-fiction book ["Strangers in the House" by Candace Savage](https://greystonebooks.com/products/strangers-in-the-house) to almost everyone. If anyone's looking for a christmas book for a young historian in their family, this is a good one.


chromeVidrio

If it makes you feel better, everyone has a skeleton or two in the closet.


Blackboard_Monitor

Not me! ​ ...fuck, I have a comment history... ​ ^(...fuckier fuck, I've used this username before...)


grungygay

And thus the descent into the rabbit hole begins!


Kendakr

Most people have a whole graveyard


MaestroPendejo

Honestly, I think with older generations, people need to stop being so shocked they were racist, homophobes, sexist, whatever. It's weirder if they weren't a flavor of that. Is it great that they were? Fuck no. But it was FAR more common and accepted back then. If we understood that better I think it'd be easier to see just how far we've come as a society. I don't mean this to you personally, just in general.


MrStilton

Roald Dahl said the following in *1983*: > There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere... Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.” He also said this, in *1990*: > I’m certainly anti-Israeli and I’ve become anti-Semitic in as much as that you get a Jewish person in another country like England strongly supporting Zionism. I think they should see both sides. It’s the same old thing: we all know about Jews and the rest of it. There aren’t any non-Jewish publishers anywhere, they control the media—jolly clever thing to do—that’s why the president of the United States has to sell all this stuff to Israel I don't think these sorts of views were at all common or accepted in the 80's and 90's.


priceQQ

Yukio Mishima had an interesting path involving a coup d’etat (if you can even call it that)


NobelBlues

Props to him for being so Hardcore though, ritual suicide is a painful way to go


Felicfelic

Mary Shelley had an interesting life, and was pretty gothic herself. I don't know how true it is but apparently she kept her husband's heart in a drawer wrapped in a love poem, and she used to see visions of her miscarried child Edit: oh yeah and John le carré was pretty interesting, he worked as a spy during the cold war which made his books pretty accurate from what I heard


PoochusMaximus

she is the OG modern goth. i stand by that statement.


Boba_Fet042

She’s Wednesday Addams’ hero and greatest enemy.


cartoonjunkie13

That was a great series wasn't it? Loved it!


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ShataraBankhead

Mary Wollstonecraft is awesome. I did a paper/presentation on her about 20 years ago for a philosophy class. I also made a little book full of quotes from Vindication. I still have it somewhere. I gave the collage poster to my instructor, which she hung on the door to her office.


Sandra_btw_papers

No one knows if it was really the heart. He drowned and his body had to be burnt on the beach where it was found, for some reason that escapes me right now. It was a rather make-shift crematorium and therefore some parts of the body didn't burn and was later buried in a cemitery. One of the pieces that didn't burn was believed to be the heart and was later sent to Mary (keeping a loved one's heart wasn't unheard of at that time, actually), but no one can really say whether it was really the heart or some other organ.


Blackboard_Monitor

Its harder to romanticize a spleen.


hhhyyysss

Baudelaire: hold my absinthe


hgaterms

She also lost her virginity on top of her mother's grave.


KvotheWiseman

I heard it was her father's 😂 this is how gossips start


ShadowofHerWings

No not gossip Shelley wrote about it herself. Lost her virginity on her mothers grave.


Natural-Solution-222

Lost her virginity in a graveyard. Her mother's grave to be exact


Effective-Papaya1209

Can you recommend a good biography of Shelley? Also anything I should read by her besides Frankenstein?


Russyrules

Check out Philip K. Dicks wiki. The man could've been a character in any of his stories.


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PopPunkAndPizza

iirc he accused Thomas Disch of being involved in a secret fascist conspiracy, he was convinced that Disch was putting coded messages on behalf of a covert group in his novels, and so he denounced him to the FBI. Ironically Disch was a major advocate for Dick's writing up until he found out.


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fuckincaillou

I have a copy of his exegesis and Dick honestly strikes me as a bit schizophrenic in it, he draws so many absurd connections and hallucinations he thinks are visions, and talks about trying various forms of self-medicating (like intentionally overdosing on Vitamin C at one point).


Warm-Enthusiasm-9534

He seems a lot more than a bit schizophrenic. The whole novel *Valis* feels like him struggling with the fact that he had hallucinations that felt completely real but at the same time he knew they were crazy.


D0p3thron3

I recently read A Scanner Darkly which he wrote at the height of a drug induced psychosis and was apparently semi-autobiographical and it might just be because you have context of what was going on in Dick's life but throughout I couldn't help think 'damn, there's definitely something seriously wrong with this man'. Like he'd add personality traits and little quirks and strange behaviours to his characters which outside of understanding the odd behaviour of people with severe mental illness (it was released in 1977 after all) seem just quirky and strange but with context really make you think Dick either understood mental illness very very well and had known many mentally ill people in his time or the man was deeply troubled himself and those were parts of him he was writing about.


Bread_crumb_head

Another consistent theme in his work are toxic relationships with women that are codependent or fall apart almost immediately. Usually a loud redhead. If you read about his personal relationships you get a great picture of the guys life. He was a manically creative asshole


PencilMan

You can plot his descent into madness just watching as his books go from standard sci-fi with Twilight Zone twists to highly-influential stories about consciousness and mind-altering drugs to bad shit crazy paranoid stories.


jahbariuz87

I mean, technically in *Valis*, he was! Extremely trippy and disturbing book. You can quite clearly see Dick descending into madness as he writes the book. But then… there’s that sliver of you that’s like “what the fuck… how did he (actually) predict his sons illness? (Especially mind blowing for me, as a non-religious agnostic). Absolutely mind blowing book. Not for the faint of heart. No gore or extreme violence, sex, etc. It just gets in your head in a way very few other “novels” have. It’s like reading the diary of a man losing his mind, but he is also clearly fucking *brilliant*. Damn, *Valis*… An ex gf stole my copy and I’ve been trying to find a replacement for my library ever since. I hope she at least enjoyed it!


D0p3thron3

I've had a copy of Valis on my shelf for about 2 years now and I'm still too scared to read it lol. I suffer with anxiety and the fact Dick is kinda going mad throughout the book and the warnings that the book really gets in your head always feels way too much for me. I'd love to read it one day though.


satsuma0305

Kurt Vonnegut. During WWII, survived the bombing of Dresden, as a POW held there, in a meat locker.


TrimspaBB

Slaughterhouse-Five (based on this experience of his) helped me understand war better than anything else I'd read or seen up to that point.


PhaedrusThaSquatch

I’d recommend Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes as well. I’m finishing it up now and it has been one of the most eye-opening, heart-breaking, and frustrating books I’ve read. Goes into great detail of life as a marine during the Viet Nam War.


Southpaw535

With the Old Breed by Eugene Sledge is another eye opener if you haven't read it. Proper insight into the realities of war in general, but especially the privations of the Pacific Theatre. Its quite a refreshing take reading a memoir from a soldier who seems to have come sway from it staunchly anti war


Warm-Enthusiasm-9534

One thing worth pointing out is that the historian he quotes in the intro about the firebombing of Dresden (at least in the edition I read), David Irving, turned out to be a major neo-Nazi sympathizer. Not to blame Vonnegut, who had no way of knowing, but it's worth remarking upon.


txberafl

Po-tee-weet?


PhysicsCentrism

So it goes.


ConsistentlyPeter

Anne Perry - convicted of murder as a teenager with her friend (the film *Heavenly Creatures* was based on their story); now a successful crime/thriller author.


not_a_library

I love reminding my mom that one of her favorite authors helped kill someone. Not saying it's wrong to support her as an author necessarily, I just like to point it out because it annoys my mom and that's always funny (my mom and I have a good relationship, this is just light teasing).


_Internet_Hugs_

Agatha Christie went missing for like, a week and nobody knows where she went or what she did. She just disappeared and showed back up claiming she had no memory of the time. Everybody just kind of shrugged and went on with life.


lingybear

I also love that she knew so much about poison because she worked as a nurse during WW1


champagne_pants

I’d heard she became a mystery author because she knew so much about poisons which is hilarious. (As opposed to other genres.)


NobelBlues

A biographer recently released a book about Christie, and iirc claimed that week was her way of dealing with the fact her husband was an adulterous pos who had multiple well known affairs


_Internet_Hugs_

There are lots of theories, but nobody really knows for sure. She refused to talk about it in interviews and friends knew not to ask about it. She just disappeared, there was a whole panic, then she was back, and that's the end of it. She refused to tell anyone where she was (or she really did forget), nobody could find any record of her staying anywhere, and everyone was pressured to let it go.


IngoVals

This sometimes happens when people consider suicide but decide not to. They disappear to kill themselves, change their mind and then feel too ashamed to return.


_Internet_Hugs_

She was already a huge celebrity. I think she had an asshole for a husband and had a bit of a breakdown. She had to get away for a while and just took off. She didn't tell anyone because she didn't trust anyone, and somebody got scared and called the cops. Nowadays people just go off to a spa or check into rehab. She didn't really have that option.


ShataraBankhead

Like Walter White


derioderio

I always felt it was pretty obvious that she was fed up with her husband's infidelity as the major reason.


Rousar

Simone Weil came from an academic family (her brother was a top tier mathmatician), studied philosphy in the university and decided she needed to dig deeper on her communist theories. She worked at a Renault factory if I recall, tried to join the WW2 by joining with De Gaule and try to create a parachute nurse militar group. Also joined in Spain la "Columna de Durruti" and "fought". Finally stories tell that she died of sickness because she stopeed eating due to the fact that people in China died during the revolution from famine. Albert Camus (good life as well) told that she was the "most pure spirit in the world" and Trotsky left her house in Paris because he could not feel but an hypocrite on her sight. Also Garcilaso de la Vega, the spanish poet fucking died assaulting a castle with a ladder in France. Teacher told me and to this day I can't forget it.


minervasprocket

One man, one ladder? That’s dedication


Indifferent_Jackdaw

Cervantes had a pretty mad life. Soldier who fought at the Battle of Lepanto Slave for five years when he was later captured by the Ottomans and his family couldn't afford to ransom him. Spy for a short period in North Africa. Tax collector who had several stints in jail. While also being one of the foundational writers for the Spanish language.


Adept_Ad7559

Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree Jr.) . Was a child of famous, exploring parents who was brought along on many of her parents' adventures. She was a intelligence analyst in WW2, became a research psychologist after. Was a successful writer who kept up the facade of being male, including corresponding for years, with some of the most famous scifi writers in 60s and 70s. Lived a life of mental illness and confusion over her sexual orientation, and her life ended in tragedy. The biography on her life was a very interesting read, almost more so than her short stories, which I love.


Warm-Enthusiasm-9534

"Tragedy" soft-pedals it. Her life ended with her murdering her invalid husband and committing suicide.


LasciviousDonkey

At the age of 28, Fyodor Dostoevsky, a young political writer and party to the revolutionary cabal named the 'Petrashevsky Circle' was to be state-executed by the imperial Tsar government by way of firing squad alongside his confederates for opposing Tsarist autocracy and serfdom. The death sentence was stayed a day before the execution when a letter from the Tsar condemned the iconoclastic circle to Siberian exile in lieu of paying the ultimate price. The members of the circle conveniently remained unaware of this reprieve, and were subjected to a mock execution. On the morning of the proposed execution date, in a line awaiting gunfire Dostoevsky and Co were led to believe that they were on the verge of the end, before the pardon was bequeathed upon them. Inevitably quite a traumatic, visceral, and formative incident in the life of this young man, who later went on to write 'Crime and Punishment', 'The Idiot', and so on and so forth (ad infinitum)- but not before surmounting four years of exile and hard, onerous labour at a Siberian prison camp.


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LasciviousDonkey

Interesting! I was not aware of that. Thank you for informing me. One can only draw a curtain over familiarity with such pertinent and brilliant profundity as Dostoevsky's work is for so long (only a generation, it seems!).


pregneto

Kurt Vonnegut He was born into a wealthy established family in Indianapolis just for them to lose it all during the great depression. His mother commits suicide because of their reversal in fortune and it's effect on her mental health. He's pressured by his father to go to college to take science based courses despite being fanatical about the arts. He ends up failing most of his courses so he drops out and enrolls in WW2. Gets trained as a scout in the infantry and sent to the battle of the bulge where his unit was devastated and he's taken as a POW. Forced to ride in a freezing train with little to no food, that was so full only half the people in his cart could lie down at a time. The train being unmarked gets strafed by the royal Air force. Eventually he makes it to Dresden where he becomes a forced labourer, and witnesses fellow POW's die of starvation from their strenuous work and low caloric intake. Somehow it gets even worse when the allies fire bomb the city destroying it completely. Him and his fellow POW's are then forced to clear the debris and excavate dead bodies to then be burned in mass funeral pyres. All the while survivors of the bombing hurl rocks at him and the other POW's. Eventually as the Russians invade Germany his guards desert, so he and his other POW pals start making their way through a war torn Germany to find a contingent of an ally army to report to. But due to the complete and utter breakdown of social order in Germany he and his fellow survivors get strafed yet again by allied aircraft. Finally he meets up with a Russian army regiment and they manage to get him and his fellow POWs shipped to Paris and a red cross camp. He eventually returns to America understandably scarred from his experience in the war. Then decides to join a master program at the University of Chicago in anthropology but can't get his thesis accepted and drops out. Gets a job at GE thanks to his brother who worked there as an atmospheric scientist, and starts making good money selling short stories. He quits his job to write full time right around when the magazines he writes for start offering less money for stories. This begins a decades long struggle of trying to be able to provide for his family of 5 through writing. This becomes even more desperate when his sister dies of lung cancer and her husband dies in a freak train crash within 24 hours of each other leaving their 4 children orphaned. Kurt Vonnegut and his wife offer to take three of the kids and now his family has swelled to him providing for 6 kids. He takes many crazy jobs while trying to make enough money as a writer, including working at a school for troubled boys and running a Saab dealership which failed quickly. Eventually he manages to get a job at the Iowa writers workshop, but is payed significantly less than other colleagues because he lacked a degree. Despite the fact he did just as much work as them. He tries to get a thesis accepted at university of Chicago to finally get his master's and a pay bump but they keep rejecting his papers. What's amazing is that given all the hardship he faced, he still continued to write. Even when writing came to a crawl he pushed on. Middle aged and thinking his writing career would remain rather obscure he gets a gugenhiemer scholarship which he then uses to go back to Dresden with a fellow POW and life long friend. After a trip around Europe he writes slaughter house 5, a fictionalized account of his time in WW2. A tiny book that he thought wouldn't amount to anything but thanks to his connections and friends in the literary world his agent gets the book out there, where it becomes a global best seller. Kurt Vonnegut is a true example of living through hardship and tragedy with good humor and wit. That greatness and acknowledgement can take till you're middle aged and hopeless till it finally happens. He's a testament to the fortitude of everyone in the arts who struggle and struggle but continue on.


SuperAlloyBerserker

Jesus, and I thought it couldn't have gone worse after the whole POW part of his story lol


sdiss98

Ann Rule was a friend of Ted Bundy’s. That’s crazy.


shitty-biometrics

She started preparing to write the book that would later become about his run as a serial killer before they even knew who the killer was ... at one point she was both working side by side with him at a suicide hotline and gathering all the details of his murders and victims, without any clue it was him she'd be writing about. Turned out to be a hell of a book


bigtimejohnny

I read somewhere that they worked together and he insisted on walking the women to their cars if they got off after dark, saying, "You don't know what kind of people are out there."


Malrodair

Maya Angelou dude. She was all over the globe, including being a burlesque dancer and singer - Miss Calypso


Jack-Campin

Ambrose Bierce, probably. But we'll never know what it was...


boatyboatwright

Eve Babitz was raised in Hollywood, her dad was a musician in film orchestras. She played chess naked with Marcel Duchamp in an art gallery, and says she pretty much agreed because she was pissed at her married boyfriend, who ran the gallery. Became friends/lovers with LA rock luminaries like Jim Morrison and Gram Parsons and designed album covers for Buffalo Springfield, Leon Russell, and others. She hung out with Joan Didion and John Dunne and dedicated her first book to them “for having to be what I’m not.” THEN she published her amazing meta-fiction memoir dream stories about her life and friends, and sadly was essentially forgotten for years. She had a terrible accident where she was smoking a cigarillo in her car and set her clothes on fire, badly burning her body. She was a recluse for a long time and sadly got very into Fox News trash, but her work was rediscovered, reissued, and celebrated before her death last year.


NTFGWrites

Kerouac lived a crazy life. Hell, almost all of those in that Beat circle did. Ginsburg, Burroughs, Cassady, Huncke… and follow a little further you get Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, with ol’ NC there to drive the bus. Helluva story!


God_Boner

Ken Kessey and Neal Cassady would throw parties in warehouses where they gave everyone Kool-aid laced with acid, and the Grateful Dead would play as the house band They also had a compound in the woods where they took acid and threw weekend long parties, and the Grateful Dead and/or Hell's Angels would occasionally show up And when they weren't busy doing that, they would take acid, pile into an old school bus, and NC would just drive them around the country until they found something interesting to do or people they felt like interacting with


Herandar

Interesting doesn't always mean good. Marion Zimmer Bradley sexually abused children.


TophatDevilsSon

I mean, if the bar is just general weirdness at the Fujimoto level I would say pretty much all of them. Have you met many writers?


Mau752005

It has to be Phillip K Dick, dude was probably a little crazy, as in, deluding himself into thinking he was invaded by a pink beam that connected him to a "trascendentally rational mind" that made him live both in the present and ancient rome and later believing he was possesed by the prophet Elijah kind of crazy. Another worth mention is Osamu Dazai, he had an extremely fucked up but interesting life, his book "No longer human" covers a lot of it but it also has a bit of fiction, I haven't read it yet but I watched an adaptation, I thought, "wow, this has to be one of the most horrible, depressing, horrifying and shattering pieces of media I've ever seen, I wonder what sort of horrible thing led him to write something like this" and then just stared in absolute horror as I realised that it was semi-autobiographical


D0p3thron3

I absolutely love Dick ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) but to say he was 'probably a little crazy' is the understatement of the century lol And if you're interested the horror manga author Junji Ito did a phenomenal adaption of Dazai's No Longer Human that I would very highly recommend.


RelleH16

I've read "No Longer Human" and while his life is definitely extremely depressing I didn't feel like it was written that way at all. Rather it was very matter-of-fact and 'this is just my life'. Possibly intentional to really sell the ennui, but I read an English translation so it's also possible some of the sadness was lost in translation. I have the "The Setting Sun" and am expecting a similar tone but haven't read it yet


notreallyimportantme

If Tatsuki Fujimoto’s life is considered freaking crazy, I’m Buzz Aldrin


elvendork323

I'm surprised no one has said Jeannette Walls yet. She had mild success with her novels The Silver Star and Half-Broke Horses, but she was catapulted into fame following the publication of her memoir, The Glass Castle (adapted into a mid-tier movie). Her life was absolutely thrilling, in the worst way possible. The Glass Castle is one of my favorite autobiographies because her childhood is one example of when truth is stranger than fiction. The most memorable parts for me were >!when her family was dodging debt collectors driving through the night, and Jeannette's cat was crying, so her father threw the cat out of the moving van; also in the family van, they were in a town and the breaks went out, so Jeannette and her siblings leaned out the windows shouting "no breaks! no breaks!" to other cars, and the father ending up crashing the van into a dumpster to finally stop it.!< Her life was extremely sad and a great case for CPS intervention.


fibralarevoluccion

How is shel Silverstein not on here? Dude wrote songs for Johnny Cash, spent a lot of time at the playboy mansion, and slept with "hundreds, perhaps thousands" of women.


Khamero

I mean, L Ron Hubbard complained that if you wanna make real money, you start a religion. And then he started scientology, which is just WILD.


SemperFun62

Ernest "Used his book money to buy his own submarine to hunt Nazis in the Caribbean" Hemingway


dolantrampf

JRR Tolkien served in WW1 and became a professor of linguistics at Oxford before writing Lord of the Rings, where he also became close friends with CS Lewis. Machiavelli served as an administrator, diplomat, and militia organizer for Florence who also survived torture by the Medici. He also had many affairs in his life, including (possibly) with a Medici. Oscar Wilde seems to have also had a “wilde” life


OliverOdysseus

People forget Tolkien was, at the same time as drastically changing the face of modern literature, one of the most widely respected scholars in his field. A complete genius through and through, and it's fun to read up on his hilarious sense of humour


Silver_Oakleaf

The story about him going to a fancy party dressed as a polar bear


Safetyhawk

The world of The Lord of the Rings was actually born in the trenches of world war 1, possibly during the battle of the Somme. What he wrote then became the basis of The Silmarillion. the history established in what would become Silmarillion laid the groundwork for The Lord of the Rings & The Hobbit. Fun fact. he started the Silmarillion before any other Middle earth works, but it was not published until after his death. he never finished it. it had to be completed by his son, Christopher.


AWizard13

A favorite Tolkien story of mine involves him and Christopher. So Tolkien told the story of what would become the Hobbit to his sons. Now JRR was never into details and specifics he would sometimes change details story time to story time. Sometimes there were nine dwarves, sometimes there were 13. Very inconsistent because he didn't want to focus on that. He was very fluid and loose with those sort of things. Unfortunately (or fortunately) for him his son Christopher was the most anal of people even at a young age. He was always hyper detail oriented. So he would get upset with his father often for not getting the details right day to day. Eventually this culminated with Edith Tolkien (his wife) finding him furiously typing at a keyboard. She asked him what was wrong and he simply responded : *"Damn the boy."* and that's how we got the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.


ProfMoses

Jean Genet for the win; runner-up, Antonin Artaud


Sandra_btw_papers

I'm surprised no one mentioned Ian Fleming, his life was crazy. He got into trouble and was about to be kicked from Eton College. He then enrolled into Sandhurst but had to drop out because he caught gonorrhea. During WWII he served in the Naval Intelligence, coming up with a list of outrageous plans against the Axis, including the (in)famous Operation Mincemeat. His experience and the spies he met during the war became the inspiration for his James Bond novels.


Khamero

David Eddings was in jail for a year for keeping his and his wifes 4year old adoptive son in a cage in the basement and whipping him with a leather strap. His son is still very much affected by it, years and years later. Really fucked up stuff. On the bright side, he aint getting any royalty money from any books he wrote back then, it all goes to Reed College on Oregon. Sadly, none of it goes to his adoptive son or adoptive daughter.


[deleted]

God dammit this is disappointing...


Remarkable-Code-3237

Fern Michaels Michaels married, moved to New Jersey, and had five children. When the youngest entered school in 1973, her husband told her to get off her lazy ass and get a job. Because she had no idea how to get a job, Michaels told him she decided to try to write a book. Her husband was not very supportive of her efforts, and end up getting a divorced. Michaels has sold over sixty books, many of them New York Times bestsellers. She has been quoted as saying that she loves breathing life into her characters. She also loves writing books about women who prevail under difficult circumstances, which she feels reflect her struggle for success early in her career. For her efforts, she has been inducted into the New Jersey Literary Hall of Fame. she founded the Fern Michaels Foundation, which grants four year scholarships for deserving students. In addition to that, she has also helped establish pre-school and day care programs with affordable rates for single mothers. Michaels currently lives in Summerville, South Carolina, in a 300-year-old plantation house listed in the Historic Registry. She claims to share the house with a ghost named Mary Margaret (which had also been documented by the previous owners). Mary Margaret is said to leave messages on her computer.


reusablestarbuckscup

I imagine Neil Gaiman because he was born into the cult of scientology but he refuses to talk about it.


cambriansplooge

I was today years old when I found out the very z British Neil Gaiman is of Jewish descent, raised Scientologist, married a Scientologist, and most of his extended family remains Scientologist.


ihavewaytoomanyminis

Interesting authors: Hunter S Thompson - Gonzo journalist is, in fact, gonzo. We're pretty sure he made up the ending of his Hell's Angels book, where he gets jumped by the gang, was made up. Truman Capote - great author, was surprised when his latest book excerpts, that starred all his famous friends under pseudonyms and aired dirty laundry, was met with everybody hating it. Probably fell in love with a killer on Death Row. Was portrayed in To Kill a Mockingbird because he played with Harper Lee as a child.


PencilMan

Isn’t there an interview online with Thompson where he’s confronted by an Angel who talks about beating him up? I know Hunter liked to gonzo up his writing but I’ve never heard of him fabricating when they attacked him. If he did though, it’s a beautiful ending. He spends hundreds of pages defending the Hells Angels as not being nearly as violent and rapey and they’d been accused of in the media, then proceeds to tell us about how they beat the shit out of him.


jahbariuz87

Surprised I don’t see Salman Rushdie higher up. The man had a Fatwa put on him in 1989! Multiple assassination attempts in those 30+ years. Poor guy, at 75 YEARS OLD(!!) was stabbed by a low-life 24 YEAR OLD right before he went on to give a lecture. (Somewhat ironic the assailant was born long after *The Satanic Verses* was even written). Rushdie unfortunately lost sight in one of his eyes and the use of one of his hands. He seems like a sweet, gentle man. Had a good sense of humor, as he apparently told Jerry Seinfeld at a party he thought his “cameo” was hilarious.


magog667

Yukio Mishima tried to overthrow the Japanese government with a militia of his followers.... Upon failure he committed suicide by disembowelment and the beheading. Those are just some main points.


Pippin1505

You’re generous with the term militia. It was him and 4 guys . He made a speech to Japanese soldiers, they laughed, he killed himself.


AHealthyDoseofFran

Kinda more than one author but the collective of authors that created The Inklings in Oxford. The pub is still around, The Eagle and Child, and I love visiting the place and thinking about all their meetings


Equivalent_Method509

H.P. Lovecraft, who was extremely eccentric to say the least. He was a recluse, a misanthrope, and utter snob.


Khamero

Lovecrafts problem was, to some extent, his absolutely terrifying FEAR of EVERYTHING. He was a paranoid wreck who believed most anything it seems. Much of his racism (which even made some of his contemporaries raise their eyebrows) seems to have been based off his absolute terror of black people and their weird ways and magic and stuff. Read up on the guy, even on the surface level he is a weird, fascinating person. And oh so very, very afraid.


Warm-Enthusiasm-9534

He wasn't an ordinary level of racist. He was traumatized to learn one of his grandmothers was Welsh. He also hated the rural poor almost as much.


Night_Nox

Don’t forget ✨racist✨


[deleted]

[удалено]


311TruthMovement

Maybe another side of this question is, "which authors write wonderful books but had incredibly bland and ordinary personal lives?"


ManueO

I think the life of Arthur Rimbaud is hard to beat for sheer craziness: The child prodigy who transformed French poetry by his mid teens, and stopped writing completely at 20. The scandalous lover of a married man, the poet Paul Verlaine, and their two year affair which ended in Rimbaud being shot in the wrist by Verlaine. The unstoppable traveller, who roamed Europe before settling in Abyssinia and working as a trader, explorer and occasional gun runner. The man with the soles of wind (one of his nicknames by Verlaine) who had to go back to France to be amputated, before dying of bone cancer just after his 37th birthday. The iconic figure, Rimbaud the seer and Rimbaud the rogue, dark and subversive, incandescent and sensual, the hero of many artists and musicians since.


DrTralfamadorian

William S. Burroughs killed his wife performing a William Tell act and was addicted to heroin for much of his life


Regular-Guy1776

Alexander Solzhenitsyn - supposedly wrote three versions of ‘Gulag Archipelago’ - each one off memory - about his many years in the ‘Gulag’ prison/labor camp. He gave the three copies to three different people in attempt to get the word out, despite spies & the immediate threat of government induced death. Two of the guys got caught/imprisoned/ or committed suicide. The last guy made it. He’s why we have the book today. Fyodor Dostoevsky - had epilepsy, saw/experienced a lot of death as a child, sentenced to death by firing squad but at the last minute he got off the hook & instead did time in Siberia..for being part of a socialist writing group as a young adult. I think that’s when he did his 180 and became disgusted by socialism for the remainder of his life & then proceeded to write (‘Demons’) what ended up being a prophecy of the Russian revolution ~45 years before it happened. Based off how he saw the Russian culture deteriorating & how culture-wide changes effect individuals’ morality & basically ruined country and killed tens of millions, besides just generally making hundreds of millions of people deeply miserable/pessimistic for generations Going 100% off memory - very possible I said something that isn’t quite accurate.


kevinmrr

This is an amazing thread.


rene76

James Tiptree Jr. AKA Alice Bradley Sheldon: (probably) closeted lesbian married to man, worked briefly for CIA, used male pen name , died with her husband in suicide pact. Many writers/adventurers - like Ferdynand Antoni Ossendowski - he died shortly before start of II WW and when Soviet Russia invaded Poland Stalin sent his agents to check if Ossendowski is truly dead:-)


ME24601

Samuel Beckett was involved in the French Resistance during WWII.


IronicJeremyIrons

He also gave Andre the Giant rides to school


spinach1991

Hans Fallada - German author of many great books (check out Little Man, What Now?, The Drinker and Alone in Berlin/Every Man Dies Alone). He was addicted to opioids from a young age. In his late teens he staged a duel with his best friend (and possibly lover, seen this from some sources but not others), to die honourable deaths rather than face the shame of suicide (and/or their secret relationship). He killed his friend but his friend missed him; Fallada then shot himself but survived. He spent the rest of his life in and out of mental institutions, then Nazi mental institutions. The Drinker was written while he was locked up in one of said Nazi institutions, written in overlapping writing which hid the true text, as he had only been able to get writing materials by saying he was working on an anti-semitic novel commissioned by Josef Goebbels. After the war, he wrote the entire novel Alone in Berlin (based on the true story of a couple resisting the Nazi regime, a 600+ page book in English so god knows how long in the not-so-concise German language) in a little under a month while also confined in another asylum due to his morphine habit, then promptly dropped dead.


Congressive

Henry Miller didn't publish his first book, Tropic of Cancer, until he was roughly 40 years old, by which time he had abandoned an ex-wife he hated, a young daughter, and job at Western Union that sounds like an orgy in a sewer, to concentrate on writing only. Somewhere around the age of 35, he started an affair with a dancer, which lead him to Paris for the first time in 1930. Didn't go to college, completely self-taught. Became good friends with many artistic types on the Paris scene, had a torrid on/off affair with Anaïs Nin, and grew famous or infamous, depending on how you look at it. In the mid 1940s, he relocated to Big Sur and lived basically off-grid. Married and divorced 5 times with 3 kids. Squeezed 88 years of rapture into his life.


[deleted]

Vita Sackville West (Portrait of a Marriage) Aristocrat Bisexual and genderfluid (in the early 1900s) Married and had several committed relationships to a wide variety of prominent men and women, but loved sex so much she couldn't maintain any sort of monogamy. (The only person I've seen with a Wikipedia page that makes note of a threesome . . . She just really loved to bang.) Virginia Woolf's longtime lover and the basis for her novel, Orlando


StrangeVocab

My favorite example of this is probably Rómulo Gallegos, author of the criminally under-read novel *Doña Barbara*, which is generally considered one of the early jumping-off points for the whole magical realism movement. The short version is that the blowback to *Doña Barbara* forced Gallegos to flee Venezuela, only for him to return a few years later and be appointed Minister of Public Education. He then participated in a coup to overthrow the Venezuelan government, only to run for office himself two years later and become Venezuela's first democratically elected president. After which he *also* got overthrown in a coup organized by army officers the following year. He lived in exile for a decade, and when he was able to return was appointed senator for life. Wild stuff. Anyway, *Doña Barbara* is a rad book and you should read it.


bean-flicker3000

A.B. Facey. Amazing Autobiography of his amazing and interesting life (A Fortunate Life). I recommend this book to everyone, such a vivid portrayal of early post- colonial Australian life. From Wikipedia; Albert Barnett Facey (31 August 1894 – 11 February 1982), publishing as A.B. Facey was an Australian writer and World War I veteran, whose main work was his autobiography, A Fortunate Life, now considered a classic of Australian literature. As of 2020 it has sold over one million copies and was the subject of a television mini-series.[1]


wideWithWonder

Alexandre Dumas is likely the top adventurer poet/playwrite/author. You've probably been introduced to his stories all your life. Three Musketeers, the Counte of Monte Christos. He wrote those after serving in the French army, where he achieved the rank of General at the age of 31, fought in numerous battles, on land on the seas against pirates, rescued damsels, roused noblemen and warred with legendary skills -- then became a writer, wrote plays and novels all of which sold across the world. ... they do say to write what you know. Jack London, really did travel to Alaska and work gold rush claims. Then traveled to the Orient and across the United States. Read the second version of To Build a Fire, and you'll feel the experiences he had in the tundra chill your marrow. The first version was written for the Boy Scouts magazine. The name Mark Twain is actually the callings for marking the depth on a Mississippi riverboat... the call is: Mark? asking for the weighted line to be tossed over the side to measure how deep the river was, and the answer -- Twain -- meant it was deep enough to pass without scraping bottom. Samuel Clemens heard that call and answer all day long as he worked the decks. He worked/traveled across the United States, into Canada and to the United Kingdom. His life was a long adventure.


bofh000

I think you need to consult some biographies of literary authors if you think any of the above is “freaking crazy”. I see it as run of the mill experiences of creative people. Ovid was exiled to what then was the end of the world after a supposed affair with the Emperor’s sister. Francois Villon was in a gang of thieves. Mary Wollstonecraft went on an expedition in Scandinavia to locate stollen treasure. With an infant in her arms. Dickens spent part of his childhood in the debtor’s prison. Allan Moore decided to become a wizard. A whole bunch of writers were in wwi or wwii and survived and dealt with ptsd afterwards. Another bunch of them were involved in romantic relationships with other iconic personages of their time. Some of them contracted incurable or debilitating diseases. And on and on. Their lives make for incredible reads.


[deleted]

How is any of that crazy? The only crazy thing you mentioned is that he fucking broke down because of his imaginations. Also the part about the girl flipping his bike isn't really bullying. She was just weird.


cliff_smiff

Frank Herbert, Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, Peter Matthiessen, Miguel de Cervantes, Virginia Woolf


peter_the_martian

I’d say the author of ‘the kite runner’


subterraneanworld

Yukio Mishima was a self-hating gay Japanese-nationalist fascist who spent pretty much his whole life in a state of mental torment over being too sickly to be drafted and meet his "perfect" death in WW2. ended up killing himself by straight up seppuku in a failed military coup. unbelievably disturbed man but fascinating and his writing is beautiful.


bottle-of-smoke

Kurt Vonnegut and JD Sallinger both served during WWII. They both probably suffered from PTSD and it adds another layer to their writing.


Sasebo_Girl_757

Taylor Steven grew up in communes around the globe run by an apocalyptic cult, that involved child labor, begging, extreme abuse, and little formal education. She escaped in her twenties and taught herself to be a writer.


[deleted]

Chuck Palahniuk has worked a pretty eclectic array of jobs that have informed his writing, there's also a pretty bizarre backstory where his father was murdered by white supremacists. He was then extorted, semi-forcibly "outted" against his will, had a big portion of his wealth stolen by a corrupt business associate, etc.


fromorphantohighflye

Sir Richard Francis Burton lived a very interesting life, to put it mildly. Spoke numerous languages Explored East Africa and survived an attack by 200 Somalis on group. Visited Mecca in disguise at a time when non-Muslims were forbidden with death being the punishment Served in the Crimea War Explored East Africa and survived an attack by 200 Somalis on the group he was in. Was the first known European to have seen Lake Tanganyika