You can find a lot of information about famous writers – how they lived, how they created their immortal works. The business of writing is not an easy one and is quite time-consuming. Reading an interesting book, the reader usually does not think about the peculiarities of the character and way of life of the writer who wrote it. But some of the facts of his biography or the history of the creation of a book is sometimes very entertaining and even provoking. So let’s learn unknown facts about famous writers.
George Byron
“Can’t be brilliant all 24 hours, there won’t be time left to shave.”
George Byron
- Suffered from manic-depressive psychosis.
- The great poet Byron was chrome, prone to obesity and extremely amorous – in one year in Venice, according to some reports, he made himself, lame and fat, happy with 250 ladies.
Charles Dickens
“Gnats and bugs are always hovering around a burning candle, but is it the candle’s fault?”
Charles Dickens
- Dickens was fond of hypnosis, or, as they called it then, mesmerism.
- One of Dickens’ favorite pastimes was going to the Paris morgue, where unidentified bodies were displayed.
- Charles Dickens always slept with his head facing north. He also sat facing north when he wrote his great works.
Oscar Wilde
“I like to talk about nothing – it’s the only thing I’m good at.”
Oscar Wilde
- Oscar Wilde did not take Dickens’ writings seriously and mocked them on every occasion.
- In fact, contemporary Charles Dickens critics hinted endlessly that he would never make the list of the best British writers.
- He graduated cum laude from Oxford in 1878.
- Wilde was a very peculiar and extravagant personality. And he even spent two years in prison. Oscar was convicted on charges of sodomy.
- Toward the end of his life Wilde changed his name to Sebastian Melmoth for some reason.
Ernest Hemingway
“Truly brave men have no reason to fight a duel, but many cowards do it all the time to assure themselves of their own bravery.”
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway was not only an alcoholic and suicidal man, as everyone knows. He also had peeraphobia (fear of public speaking), and he never believed the praise of even his sincerest readers and admirers. Not even to his friends, that’s all!
Hemingway survived five wars, four automobile and two air disasters.
Hemingway often and willingly speculated that the FBI was watching him. His interlocutors smiled wryly, but eventually it turned out that he was right – declassified documents confirmed that it was indeed surveillance, not paranoia.
Lewis Carroll
“In our world everyone is crazy.”
Lewis Carroll
- In his personal journals Carroll constantly repented of a certain sin. However, these pages were destroyed by the writer’s family so as not to tarnish his image. Some researchers seriously believe that Carroll was Jack the Ripper, who, as you know, was never found.
- Carroll suffered from swamp fever, cystitis, lumbago, eczema, furunculosis, arthritis, pleurisy, rheumatism, insomnia and a host of other ailments. In addition, he was almost incessantly – and very much – a headache.
- Carroll himself invented a tricycle, a mnemonic system for remembering names and dates, and an electric pen.
Franz Kafka
“One lies the least when one lies the least, not when there is the least reason for it.”
Franz Kafka
- Worked as a clerk. By modern standards, he was a typical office plankton, a nerd and a loser.
- Franz Kafka was the grandson of a kosher butcher and a strict vegetarian.
- Throughout his life he managed to publish only a few short stories unnoticed by the public. Before he died, he willed his executor, Max Brod, to destroy all his manuscripts. But Max Brod did not submit to the dying man’s will. Thus Franz Kafka became a world-famous writer. Posthumously.
- Kafka is now one of the main mascots of Prague.
William Shakespeare
“You are so eager to judge the sins of others, start with your own and don’t get to other people’s.”
William Shakespeare
- William Shakespeare “was born and died on the same day, April 23.”
- Contemporaries claimed that Shakespeare was into poaching – he hunted deer on Sir Thomas Lucey’s property, without any permission.
- A crater on Mercury is named after Shakespeare.
- For several hundred years there has been debate as to whether he was the true author of the works published under his name.
Agatha Christie
“Talk was invented to keep people from thinking.”
Agatha Christie
- During World War I, she worked as a nurse in a military hospital. Later she worked in a pharmacy, so she was well versed in poisons, and many of the murders in her books were committed by means of poisons.
- Agatha Christie suffered from dysgraphia, that is, she could hardly write by hand. All of her famous novels were dictated.
- Brian Aldiss, an acquaintance of Agatha Christie, once described her methods – “she would finish the book to the last chapter, then choose the most unlikely of the suspects and, going back to the beginning, redo some points to frame him.”
Arthur Conan Doyle
“Nothing is so deceptive as too obvious facts.”
Arthur Conan Doyle
- Arthur Conan Doyle, who invented Sherlock Holmes, was an occultist and believed in the existence of little winged fairies.
- Arthur Conan Doyle, in the Sherlock Holmes stories, described many forensic methods that were not yet known to the police. Among them were collecting cigarette butts and cigarette ashes, identifying typewriters, and looking at traces at the scene with a magnifying glass. Subsequently, the police made extensive use of these and other Holmes techniques.
- Arthur Conan Doyle had an extremely strained relationship with Bernard Shaw, who once referred to Sherlock Holmes as “an addict without a single agreeable quality.”
- On Arthur’s tombstone, at the request of his widow, is engraved the chivalrous motto: Steel True, Blade Straight.