Interesting Facts About Authors

     Interesting Facts About Authors

Virginia Woolf was the granddaughter of novelist William Makepeace Thackeray.

Aldous Huxley was the great-nephew of Matthew Arnold.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, lived next door to Mark Twain.

Evelyn Waugh’s first wife’s name was Evelyn. They were known as ‘He-Evelyn’ and ‘She-Evelyn’.

Arthur Ransome, author of Swallows and Amazons, married Leon Trotsky’s secretary.

In 1951, William Burroughs accidentally shot his common-law wife Joan Vollmer dead at a party during a drunken game of ‘William Tell’.

Samuel Johnson had only three pupils enrol at the school he opened in the 1730s. However, one of those three was future actor David Garrick.

Jonathan Swift invented the name Vanessa.

Vladimir Nabokov had a ‘genitalia cabinet’ in which he kept his collection of male blue butterfly genitalia. It’s now housed at Harvard.

In 1974, Arthur C. Clarke predicted the internet of the year 2001.

Edgar Allan Poe was one of the first to propose a solution to the cosmological problem known as Olbers’ paradox.

Lewis Carroll once stayed up all night composing this anagram of British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone: ‘Wild agitator, means well’.

Stieg Larsson said that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was based on what Pippi Longstocking would be like as an adult.

Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan (1651), who famously described human life as ‘nasty, brutish and short’, lived to be 91 years old.

In 1849, Dostoevsky was sentenced to death by firing squad. At the very last minute the sentence was commuted to four years’ hard labour.

The author of The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins, was one of the writers on the 1990s children’s TV show Clarissa Explains It All.

Alexandre Dumas fought his first duel at age 23. During the course of the duel, his trousers fell down.

Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge joined the army under the name Silas Tomkyn Cumberbatch.

Before settling on the pen name Mark Twain, Samuel Langhorne Clemens signed his writings with the pseudonym ‘Josh’.

Before finding fame as a novelist, The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown was a pop singer. One of his solo albums was called Angels and Demons.

Detective fiction author Dashiell Hammett started out as a private detective; his first case was to track down a stolen Ferris wheel.

Washington Irving, who wrote both ‘Rip van Winkle’ and ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’, suffered from insomnia.

T. E. Lawrence lost the manuscript for his masterpiece The Seven Pillars of Wisdom at Reading railway station. He had to rewrite it from notes.

Jean-Dominique Bauby ‘dictated’ his book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, about his life following a stroke, by blinking his left eyelid.

Stella Gibbons wrote much of her novel Cold Comfort Farm while commuting to work on the London Underground.

Friedrich von Schiller kept rotten apples in his desk. He claimed that he needed the scent of their decay to help him write.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once danced on the lawn of publishers Doubleday to attract Joseph Conrad; the caretaker noticed him and had him removed.

Franz Kafka would attend nudist camps but refused to drop his trousers; he was known by others as ‘The Man in the Swimming Trunks’.

When Marcel Proust and James Joyce met in 1922, they spent dinner talking about their ailments before admitting they hadn’t read each other’s work.

When he worked for Faber, T. S. Eliot liked to seat visiting authors in chairs with whoopee cushions and offer them exploding cigars.

Mrs Beeton was only 21 when she began her Book of Household Management, which sold 2 million copies in its first decade. She died aged 28.

Noel Coward claimed he began every day by checking the obituary column in The Times; if he wasn’t listed there, he could get down to work.

Agatha Christie disliked her creation Hercule Poirot, calling him ‘a detestable, bombastic, tiresome, egocentric little creep’.

Enid Blyton’s 1946 Gay Story Book included tales