Secret Lives of Great Authors: What Your Teachers Never Told You about Famous Novelists, Poets, and Playwrights

By Robert Schnakenberg and Mario Zucca

The strange-but-true tales of the rumors, idiosyncrasies, and feuds of literary legends—including Agatha Christie, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Shakespeare, and more

This fascinating—and shocking!—tour through the lives of classic literature icons is the perfect stocking stuffer for book lovers and fans of little-known history.
 
With outrageous and uncensored profiles of everyone from William Shakespeare to Thomas Pynchon, Secret Lives of Great Authors tackles all the tough questions your high school teachers were afraid to ask: What’s the deal with Lewis Carroll and little girls? Is it true that J. D. Salinger drank his own urine? How many women—and men—did Lord Byron actually sleep with? And why was Ayn Rand such a big fan of Charlie’s Angels? Classic literature was never this much fun in school!

Authors included:
William Shakespeare
Lord Byron
Honoré de Balzac
Edgar Allan Poe
Charles Dickens
The Brontë Sisters
Henry David Thoreau
Walt Whitman
Leo Tolstoy
Emily Dickinson
Lewis Carroll
Louisa May Alcott
Mark Twain
Oscar Wilde
Arthur Conan Doyle
W.B. Yeats
H.G. Wells
Gertrude Stein
Jack London
Virginia Woolf
James Joyce
Franz Kafka
T.S. Eliot
Agatha Christie
J.R.R. Tolkien
F. Scott Fitzgerald
William Faulkner
Ernest Hemingway
Ayn Rand
Jean-Paul Sartre
Richard Wright
William Burroughs
Carson McCullers
J.D. Salinger
Jack Kerouac
Kurt Vonnegut
Toni Morrison
Sylvia Plath
Thomas Pynchon

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Mar 18, 2014
• ISBN: 9781594747441

Reviews for Secret Lives of Great Authors

[lindap69 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

fun collection of facts, quotes and trivia about some of the classic authors

[mstrust · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

After a brief bio and explanation of why an author became famous, or even, iconic, their chapter is broken up into smaller sections of juicy gossip involving serious character flaws, kinks, scandals or just the unearthing of little-known facts. Who knew that Oscar Wilde's teeth were black due to mercury treatment, that H.G. Wells met and liked Stalin or that Tolkien was known around Oxford for trying to force other cars off the road? And Agatha Christie's father was American, which is something I'd never heard before, and the whole mess with Hemingway's favorite son is bizarre.If you tend to like The People's Almanac type books, as I do, because they lead you to authors and give good backstories, you'll probably like this one. Added bonus are the drawings of each author, usually doing something anti-social such as Alcott cuddling a bottle of laudanum.

[spk27 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

There are some truly amazing facts in this book, of which my personal favourite was the revelation that Mark Twain once gave a speech to an audience that included Queen Elizabeth I.Pretty impressive, given that she died more than 200 years before he was born.

[knightlight777 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I vignette of quirky unknown things about many high profile authors. I enjoyed the gossipy nature of the presentations. It seems most of these great talents had the bent of strangeness that is so attached to creative genius. Well maybe not always genius but enough to be memorialized in their work.

[librolindsay · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Great trivia for all of us book nerds.