Controversial Writers | Guy Portman's Blog

7 Politically Inclined Authors

May 08 2015

This is a post that I wrote a while back about famous authors who held strong political opinions.

The following 7 authors were all politically inclined:

Hunter S. Thompson

(July 18th 1937 – February 20th 2005)

The father of Gonzo journalism was an iconic figure in the counter-culture. Despite his love of firearms and ardent support of the Second Amendment, Thompson’s politics were firmly entrenched in the far-left. A sworn enemy of Richard Nixon, he was vociferous in his support of George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election. He covered the election in dispatches for Rolling Stone, which laid the foundation for his book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72.

Click here to read my review of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

John Steinbeck

(February 27th 1902 – December 20th 1968)

John Steinbeck was a prolific novelist and short-story writer, and one of the most acclaimed literary figures America has ever produced. The author was very critical of capitalism and a supporter of unionisation, recurring themes in many of his books. His most famous work, The Grapes of Wrath, was viewed as so controversial at the time of its publication due to its criticism of the nation’s economic plight that it was burned on 2 separate occasions in the author’s hometown of Salinas.

Click here to read my review of In Dubious Battle.

Zora Neale Hurston

(January 7th 1891 – January 28th 1960)

Zora Neale Hurston was an American folklorist, anthropologist and author, who wrote 4 novels and more than 50 short stories, plays and essays. Her most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, was published in 1937. The highly opinionated Hurston could probably best be described as a conservative libertarian. Unlike many of her Soviet sympathising colleagues in the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston, a staunch patriot, was vehemently anti-Communist. She often referred to them as ‘commies’ and ‘reds’ in her writing.

Maxim Gorky

(March 28th 1868 – June 18th 1936)

Maxim Gorky is one of Russia’s most popular authors. His opposition to the Tsarist regime led to him being arrested on numerous occasions. Gorky, who associated with many revolutionaries, became a friend of Lenin. Later he provided financial support to the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Widely accepted as being the first famous Russian writer to emerge from the proletariat, Gorky is remembered as being a lifelong supporter of the Bolshevik cause and the founder of the Socialist realism literary method.

Click here to read my review of My Childhood.

Leo Tolstoy

(September 9th 1828 – November 20th 1910)

Russian novelist Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy is widely regarded as being one of the greatest writers of all time. His most famous works are War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Tolstoy was a Christian Anarchist, who believed that non-resistance was the only way to achieve a Utopian society. His beliefs influenced Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. Tolstoy’s argument that peaceful anarchy could only be brought about by non-violent revolution is explained in his essay On Anarchy (1900).

Kurt Vonnegut

(November 11th 1922 – April 11th 2007)

Vonnegut was an American author, whose writing incorporated science fiction, black humour and satire. He was a pacifist intellectual and supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union. When he died in 2007 The New York Times described him as ‘the counterculture’s novelist’. His seminal work, Slaughterhouse-Five, is a satire about a survivor of the notorious firebombing of Dresden in World War II. Its anti-war rhetoric has resulted in it being banned by numerous US schools and libraries.

Click here to read my review of Slaughterhouse-Five.

George Orwell

(June 25th 1903 – January 21st 1950)

Author and journalist George Orwell was interested in social injustice, opposed to totalitarianism and committed to democratic socialism. So strongly was Orwell opposed to Fascism that he even volunteered to fight in The Spanish Civil War. His experiences there gave rise to his book, Homage to Catalonia (1938). Orwell’s most famous works, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, both warned of the dangers of totalitarianism. They were perceived as being a thinly disguised attack on Stalin and banned in the Soviet Union.

Click on the links to read my reviews of Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier.

Controversial Authors (Part 5)

Aug 30 2013

This is the final instalment of the Controversial Authors series. Initially I planned for the series to have only three parts, but there are so many authors that have been regarded as controversial through the course of history that I added an additional two.

Thomas Paine

(January 29th 1737 – June 8th 1809)

Notable works: Common Sense, The Rights of Man, The Age of Reason

Thomas Paine was a political activist, author, political theorist, revolutionary and one of America’s Founding Fathers. He arrived in America from England in 1774, just in time to participate in The American Revolution. Paine’s pamphlet, Common Sense (1776), sold an estimated half-a-million copies during the course of the revolution and is regarded as one of the most influential works of the eighteenth-century.

However when Thomas Paine died in 1809, his funeral was only attended by six people and his obituaries were universally scathing. Abraham Lincoln’s friends even burned a booklet he had written and over a hundred years after Paine’s demise, Theodore Roosevelt referred to him as a ‘filthy little atheist.’ If Paine had been martyred in The American Revolution there seems little doubt that his face would be gracing bills today. It was the controversy of his later writing, particularly The Age of Reason (1794) that were to seal his remarkable fall from grace.

In The Age of Reason Paine defended freedom against what he regarded as religious dogmatism, in the same manner that he had defended freedom against political tyranny during The American Revolution. The book was essentially a critique of The Bible, in which the author aired his own personal views on organised religion. These views were extremely controversial at the time of its publication and were to remain so over the forthcoming years. Though the author stated his strong personal belief in spirituality in the book, he was accused of being an atheist, something that was to cost what many view as his rightful place of honour amongst the The Founding Fathers.

Chuck Palahniuk

(Born: February 21st 1962)

Notable works: Fight Club, Haunted, Choke

Born in Pasco, Washington state, the American novelist and freelance journalist of Ukrainian descent, has constantly courted controversy with the content of his books; no mean feat in today’s era of tolerance. Palahniuk’s first novel, Invisible Monsters, a fictional story about a model who is shot in the face, was rejected by publishers for its disturbing content. His next effort, Fight Club, which remains to this day his most celebrated, saw the author attempt to be yet more controversial and scandalous than in his first effort. To Palahniuk’s surprise the book was published. It went on to become an international success, in no small part due to it being adapted for the big screen.

The film was extremely controversial at the time of its release in 1999, only six months after the Columbine school shootings. There had been much publicity over the perceived role of violent media in relation to the incident and Fight Club was viewed by many as glamourising violence. Real fight clubs soon began appearing throughout the United States and beyond, only adding to the furore.

Palahniuk’s dark and disturbing Fiction has continued to scandalise ever since. The short story, Guts, about masturbation accidents, contained in his book, Haunted, was met with such shock that people even passed out at public readings, only adding to the author’s notoriety. Haunted is often voted in polls as one of the most disturbing books ever written and has been banned along with the author’s other works in many schools. In Turkey, the translator of Palahniuk’s book, Snuff, was detained and interrogated by the police over what the authorities regarded as the book’s offensive content.

There seems little doubt that the author’s graphic depictions of violence and sex will cause more controversy, especially with further adaptations of Palahniuk’s books due for the silver screen in the near future.

Click on the links to read my reviews of Fight Club, Haunted and Damned and Adam’s (resident book reviewer’s) review of Survivor.

Click here to read Part 4 of Controversial Authors.

Controversial Authors

May 31 2013

Many authors have been branded as being controversial over the course of history. What actually constitutes controversy is of course a highly subjective matter and an author whose work was viewed as being controversial in one era may not be in a later one. Then there are those authors whose controversy may not be limited only to their work but also to their actions. The following blog post is dedicated to two authors, widely regarded as being controversial, who will always be remembered as being pioneers by the literary establishment.

Voltaire

(November 21st 1694 – May 30th 1778)

Notable works: Candide, Letters on England and Zadig.

Living to the ripe old age of eighty-three in an era with a life expectancy of about fifty, Voltaire is remembered to this day as being a central figure in the 1700’s intellectual movement, The Enlightenment. A prolific and witty writer, Voltaire embraced a variety of writing forms including poems, plays, essays, novels, scientific and historical works. Unrelenting in his criticism of the establishment, church and the order of the day, Voltaire can in many ways be viewed as a modern person, due to his opinions about social reform, his criticism of elements within The Bible and his preaching of religious tolerance. Voltaire’s beliefs and determination to voice them certainly didn’t endear him to many and he had to endure beatings, two stints in The Bastille and a period of exile in London. His most famous work is undoubtedly the novella, Candide, a satirical work that was widely banned at the time due to it being viewed as blasphemous and revolutionary.

William S. Burroughs

(February 5th 1914 – August 2nd 1997)

Notable works: Junkie, Queer, The Soft Machine & The Naked Lunch.

William S. Burroughs will always be remembered as being at forefront of the Beat generation, influencing the likes of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. His works include eighteen novels, in addition to a number of novellas and short stories, many of which are semi-autobiographical in nature. Burroughs’s writing is characterised as being sardonic, dark and often humorous. Arguably his most famous book, the non-linear Naked Lunch was so scandalous at the time of its publication that it underwent a court case under U.S. obscenity laws. A controversial character with a penchant for rent boys and heroin use, Burroughs ended up killing his second wife Joan Vollmer in Mexico after attempting to shoot a water-tumbler, which she had balanced on her head. Even in death controversy continues to follow Burroughs. Only last year a Turkish publisher faced obscenity charges after releasing a Turkish translation of The Soft Machine.

Click here to read a review of The Soft Machine.