September | 2015 | Guy Portman's Blog

10 Bizarre Author Deaths

Sep 25 2015

Though death is admittedly a rather morbid subject matter it is one that fascinates many of us, including me.

I have only included male authors in this post, the reason being that the female authors that I am aware of, who died in a manner that some might describe as bizarre (notably Sylvia Plath & Virginia Woolf), I concluded were more tragic than bizarre, so I omitted them.

Here are 10 authors who met bizarre ends. They are presented in chronological order.

Aeschylus(525/524 BC – 456/455 BC)

Often described as the father of tragedy, Aeschylus, along with Sophocles and Euripides, are the only Greek tragedians, whose plays are still performed and read today. Aeschylus wrote an estimated 70 to 90 plays, only 7 of which have survived. The playwright purportedly met his end when an eagle looking for a hard object to break open the shell of the turtle it was carrying, mistook Aeschylus’s bald head for a rock. The eagle dropped the turtle, killing the great tragedian instantly.

Cause of Death: Turtle falling on head

Li Bai(701 AD – 762 AD)

Chinese poet Li Bai was one of the 2 most prominent poets in China during the mid-Tang dynasty. Approximately 1000 poems are attributed to him, some of which are still studied in Chinese schools. Legend has it that Li Bai met a bizarre end when travelling on a boat one night. In his inebriated state, he allegedly attempted to embrace the moon, which resulted in him falling into the Yangtze River and drowning. Though some doubt the authenticity of this tale, it has long since gone down in myth.

Cause of Death: Drowning

Pietro Aretino(April 20th 1492 – October 21st 1556)

Aretino was an Italian author, playwright, poet and unrepentant satirist, who is widely regarded as being the inventor of modern literate pornography. Ironically the humourist purportedly met his demise due to laughing himself to death. There has been much speculation over how Aretino died. One version is that Aretino was at a party, when a guest told him a joke, involving the writer’s own sisters and the brothel that they were employed at. So amused was Aretino that he was unable to stop laughing, and falling back in his chair, died of suffocation.

Cause of Death: Died from laughing

Julien Offray de la Mettrie(November 23rd 1709 – November 11th 1751)

French philosopher and physician, de la Mettrie, is best known for his work L’homme machine (Machine Man). On November 11th 1751 the rampant hedonist was invited to a banquet, hosted by the French ambassador to Prussia. Either as an attempt to show off his powers of gluttony, or his strong constitution, de la Mettrie devoured an enormous quantity of pâté de fait aux truffes (pâte made from truffles). The resulting gastric illness culminated in a slow and painful death for the controversial writer.

Cause of Death: Overeating

Edgar Allan Poe(January 19th 1809 – October 7th 1849)

Poe’s tales of mystery and the macabre are still widely read to this day. On October 3rd 1849 Mr. Joseph Walker found Poe wandering the streets of Baltimore in a delirious state. He was taken to hospital, but died 4 days later. There has been much speculation surrounding his sudden deterioration and death. His demise has been attributed to alcoholism, TB, epilepsy, cooping (a practice in which citizens were attacked, absconded, plied with alcohol and forced to vote for a political candidate), diabetes and even rabies.

Cause of Death: A mystery

Gustav Kobbé(March 4th 1857 – July 27th 1918)

American music critic and author Gustav Kobbé’s posthumously published, The Complete Opera Book, remains to this day the opera lover’s bible. Kobbé was on the verge of international fame when he met his demise. On July 27th 1918, Kobbé, an avid sailor, was out sailing in the Great South Bay off Bay Shore, New York, when an errant seaplane coming into land, misjudged its descent and struck his boat, killing the opera critic instantly.

Cause of Death: Hit by aeroplane

Dan Andersson(April 6th 1888 – September 16th 1920)

Dan Andersson was a Swedish author, poet and composer, who became a cult figure in his native Sweden posthumously. The 32-year-old Andersson met an unfortunate end when he went to Stockholm in September 1920. On arrival at his hotel, the receptionist failed to inform him that his room had just been treated with hydrogen cyanide, in an effort to eradicate an infestation of bed bugs. At 3pm on September 16th 1920 Andersson was found dead in his room.

Cause of Death: Hydrogen Cyanide

Sherwood Anderson(September 13th 1876 – March 8th 1941)

Anderson found fame during his lifetime with his interrelated short story sequence, Winesburg, Ohio and his bestselling novel, Dark Laughter. In 1941 at the age of 64, Anderson fell ill with abdominal pains on a cruise to South America. He was rushed to hospital, where he was diagnosed with peritonitis and died. The autopsy revealed that he had swallowed a toothpick, which had damaged his internal organs, causing the infection. It is widely assumed that this occurred when the author was eating the olive from a martini.

Cause of Death: Swallowed a toothpick

Yukio Mishima(January 14th 1925 – November 25th 1970)

Arguably the most important Japanese author of the 20th Century, Mishima was a nationalist with a commitment to the code of the Samurai (bushido). On November 25th 1968 the author and 4 members of his Tatenokai ‘shield society’ (a private militia sworn to protect the Emperor of Japan) barricaded themselves in the Tokyo headquarters of the Eastern Command of Japan’s self-defence forces. Having delivered a speech from the balcony to the soldiers below, Mishima committed Seppuku, a Japanese ritual suicide consisting of disembowelment followed by beheading.

Cause of Death: Seppuku

Tennessee Williams(March 26th 1911 – February 25th 1983)

American playwright Tennessee Williams found fame with his play The Glass Menagerie (1944), a big hit on Broadway in New York. By the 1960s the talented playwright had descended into depression, drug use and commitments to mental health facilities. On the morning of February 26th 1983, Williams was found dead in his suite at the Elysee Hotel in New York. The medical examiner’s report indicated that the cause of death was choking to death on a cap from a bottle of eye drops.

Cause of Death: Swallowing bottle of eye drops

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10 Famous Authors’ Day Jobs

Sep 18 2015

This week’s blog post is dedicated to famous authors’ day jobs. Whether it is/was due to financial necessity, or through choice, many authors have/had other careers.

Here are 10 famous authors and their day jobs.

Bram Stoker – (1847 – 1912) – Stoker is best remembered for his seminal work Dracula, but he also wrote 11 other novels and 3 collections of short stories. The author spent 27 years working as an acting manager and business manager for Irving’s Lyceum Theatre in London.

Joseph Conrad – (1857 – 1924) – Many of Joseph Conrad’s works have a nautical theme. This is not surprising considering that the author had a 19 year career in the merchant-marine, which began when he left his native Poland as a teenager in 1874.

Lewis Carroll – (1832 – 1898) – The author of the children’s classics Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass was a brilliant mathematician, who produced numerous books on the subject. Carroll also had stints working as an artist, photographer and Anglican cleric.

Agatha Christie – (1890 – 1976) – It was during World War I that prolific author Agatha Christie began writing detective stories. At the time she was employed as an apothecary’s assistant. Her knowledge of poisons was to come in useful in her detective stories.

Herman Melville – (1819 – 1891) – Although the author of Moby-Dick had some success with his writing in his younger years, money problems meant that he was forced to work for much of his life. Melville was employed as a customs inspector in New York for 19 years.

Arthur Conan Doyle – (1859 – 1930) – The creator of Sherlock Holmes was an important figure in the field of crime fiction. Doyle was also a practicing doctor, whose field of expertise was ophthalmology. He quit medicine to concentrate on writing full time.

Virginia Woolf – (1882 – 1941) – Woolf is regarded as one of the greatest literary innovators Britain has produced. To escape publishing houses creative restraints, Woolf and her husband started their own publishing house, Hogarth Press. In addition to her works, they published Russian translations and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

Franz Kafka – (1883 -1924) – Kafka did not receive much acclaim for his writing efforts during his lifetime. The iconic author worked in various occupations, including being employed at an insurance firm. In 1911, Kafka co-founded Prague’s first asbestos factory.

Vladimir Nabokov – (1899 – 1977) – The Russian born Nabokov was an author, chess composer and lepidopterist (someone who specialises in the study of moths & butterflies). At once time Nabokov was the curator of the moth and butterfly collection at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology.

Harper Lee – (Born: 1926) – The reclusive Harper Lee always wanted to be a writer, but in her younger years she earned a living through other endeavours. Lee had a 8 year stint working as an airline ticket agent before quitting to concentrate on her writing.

6 Great Books Initially Underappreciated

Sep 11 2015

This week sees the latest instalment in my popular famous book series. The following 6 books are presented in the order in which they were published.

Walden by Henry David Thoreau

First published in 1854, Walden is about Thoreau’s time living in a cabin that he built in the woods near Concord, Massachusetts. Life in the Woods (Walden’s original name) only sold 2,000 copies in its first 5 years. However this manual for self-reliance went on to become extremely popular. The emergence of the environmental movement is undoubtedly one reason for Walden’s belated success.

The Metamorphosis and Other Stories by Franz Kafka

The Metamorphosis is about a man who wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed into a beetle. It was first published in a literary magazine in 1915, 9 years before its author’s death. The story did not garner much interest. Today The Metamorphosis is regarded as one of the most important works of fiction of the 20th Century.

Click here to read my review.

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

The story follows the quest to exact revenge on a white whale, who had previously destroyed Captain Ahab’s ship. Moby-Dick was something of a disaster for its author. The book was lambasted by most reviewers and sold merely a few copies. When it was published in England, a mistake led to the epilogue being omitted. Moby-Dick became popular during the Melville revival of the early 20th Century.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

When Brave New World was published in 1932 most critics disliked Huxley’s dystopian view of the future. Even fellow author and futurist H.G. Wells was critical of the book. The bad press resulted in only a few thousand copies initially being sold in America. Brave New World was ranked 5th in Modern Library’s 1999 list of the best English-language novels of the 20th Century.

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

This dystopian novel is about a group of boys stranded on a deserted island, who attempt to govern themselves. Lord of the Flies was rejected 20 times before Faber and Faber accepted it. The book sold only about 3,000 copies in the United States before going out of print. In 2005 the novel was chosen by TIME magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Set during the Great Depression, The Grapes of Wrath is about a poor family from Oklahoma, who trek to California to start a new life. People were so outraged at its controversial depiction of the poor that the book was banned and even burned in Steinbeck’s hometown of Salinas. The Grapes of Wrath went on to win a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. In 1962 its author won the Nobel Prize.

6 Writers Who Went Into Hiding

Sep 04 2015

This week sees the latest instalment in my famous author series. Prior to researching this subject matter I was only aware of 2 writers who had gone into hiding, but I soon discovered there were/are many more.

Here are 6 writers who went into hiding:

Samuel Beckett (April 13th 1906 – December 22nd 1989)

Irish born avant-garde novelist, playwright and poet Samuel Beckett is regarded as one of the most influential writers of the 20th Century. His accolades include having won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969. Beckett spent most of his adult life in Paris. When Germany occupied Paris in 1940, Beckett joined the French Resistance. In 1942 Beckett’s unit was betrayed. He fled to the village of Roussillon, where he continued assisting the resistance effort, as well as working on his novel Watt.

Salman Rushdie (Born: June 19th 1947)

Salman Rushdie’s second novel, Midnight’s Children, won the Booker Prize in 1981. His fourth book, The Satanic Verses (1988), caused controversy from the outset. The title of the book was deemed offensive by many Muslims, as it refers to a number of allegedly pagan verses, temporarily included in the Qur’an and later removed. When the Supreme Leader of Iran, The Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a Fatwa against the author in January 1989, Rushdie was rushed into the protective custody of Special Branch.

Anne Frank
(June 12th 1929 – February/March 1945)

Anne Frank was a member of a Jewish family, who spent 2 years hiding in concealed rooms behind a bookcase in a building in Amsterdam. During this period Anne kept a diary chronicling her life. When her family was betrayed Anne Frank and her sister Margot were sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they died, most likely as a result of typhus. However, her wartime diary, The Diary of a Young Girl, survived. It was first published in the UK and US in 1952.

Hamed Abdel-Samad (Born: February 1st 1972)

Hamed Abdel-Samad is a German-Egyptian historian, political scientist and author, who in his youth was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. He later became an atheist. His autobiography, Mein Abschied vom Himmel (My Farewell from Heaven), provoked anger in his home country of Egypt. When a fatwa was issued against the author he was placed under police protection. As a result of continued death threats, Abdel-Samad has spent time in hiding. Not surprisingly he does not list a location on his Twitter profile @hamed_samad.

Juan Tomás Avila Laurel (Born: 1966)

Juan Tomás Avila Laurel is an Equatorial-Guinean novelist, short story writer and poet. Laurel’s writing has been highly critical of his country’s political and economic landscape. This has not endeared him to all in Equatorial Guinea, one of the World’s most repressive regimes. His disgust with his country’s government led him to move to Spain, but after his asylum application was refused he returned home. Concern over potential persecution from Equatorial Guinea’s security forces have forced Avila Laurel to go into hiding.

Taslima Nasreen (Born: 25 August 1962)

Bangladeshi author and poet Taslima Nasreen became a controversial figure in her home country due to her feminist views and criticism of religion. In 1993 a fatwa was issued against her. The following year she fled to West Bengal. 8 years later concerns for her safety culminated in Nasreen going into hiding in New Delhi. In 2015 death threats from Islamic extremists resulted in the author moving to the US. She has not been able to return to Bangladesh, or her adopted home of West Bengal.

Archive - September 2015

10 Bizarre Author Deaths

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10 Famous Authors’ Day Jobs

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6 Great Books Initially Underappreciated

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6 Writers Who Went Into Hiding

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Archive - September 2015

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