20 Bizarre Author-Related Facts
In recent years I have dedicated a number of blog posts to the topic of bizarre author-related trivia. Here are 20 of the most bizarre author facts I have come across to date.
Modernist writer Katherine Mansfield wore a mourning dress to her own wedding.
Zadie Smith spent the best part of 2 years writing and rewriting the first 20 pages of her novel, On Beauty.
William Burroughs accidentally killed his partner Joan Vollmer by shooting her in the head.
There is an asteroid named after Kurt Vonnegut.
J.R.R. Tolkien typed the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy with two fingers.
Dr Seuss included the word ‘contraceptive’ in a draft of his children’s book Hop on Pop to make sure the publisher was concentrating.
It took Helen Hooven Santmyer 50 years to pen And Ladies of the Club.
Dan Brown is a fan of inversion therapy He often hangs upside down in antigravity boots because he claims it helps him relax.
John Boyne claims to have written The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas in only 2 and a half days.
ELIYZABETH YANNE STRONG-ANDERSON is the author of Birth Control Is Sinful in the Christian Marriages and Also Robbing God of Priesthood. Every letter in the book capitalised.
Helen Hoover Santymeyer was 88 when her seminal work And Ladies of the Club was published.
John Steinbeck — Steinbeck was obsessed with pencils, particularly Blackwing 602’s.
American music critic and author Gustav Kobbé’s was out sailing when a seaplane misjudged its descent and struck his boat, killing him.
Vladimir Nabokov had a fixation with index cards. The majority of his novels were written out on cards with a pencil.
Dorothy Parker’s epitaph reads, Excuse my dust
Victor T. Cheney is the author of Castration: The Advantages and the Disadvantages.
In 1912 Ambrose Bierce invented 1 of the earliest emoticons, the snigger point, written as \ ___ /! It was designed to look like a smiling mouth.
Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables contains a sentence that is 823 words long.
Jane Austen never married, but she was engaged for 1 night. She accepted the proposal of marriage 2 weeks prior to her 27th birthday. Austen changed her mind the next day.
Billy Wilder epitaph is, I’m a writer but then nobody’s perfect
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Memorable facts Guy. I wonder if Burroughs really accidentally shot Volmer in the head or did he just claim to have done it ‘accidentally’. Who knows. Burroughs was a genius but he could be really stupid (his business ventures) so maybe it’s true. But he’s still my favourite writer regardless!
A quite extraordinary event.
These were great, Guy. I am always amazed at some of the unusual events that seem to surround writers. Happy Weekend to you.
Me too John.
Us writers are a strange bunch – some interesting facts here, Guy.
Thanks Heather.