You don’t have to be bonkers to be a great writer, but your biographer needs *something* to work with. Unusual life experiences, eccentric hobbies, or at just an amusing anecdote or two.
One hundred more-or-less believable factlets to attribute. Hints on request.
The authors:
Aeschylus, Conrad Aiken, Dante Alighieri, Kingsley Amis, Hans Christian Andersen, Gabriele D’Annunzio, W. H. Auden
Li Bai (Li Po), Samuel Beckett, John Berryman, Ambrose Bierce, William Blake, Jorge Luis Borges, Richard Brautigan, Bertolt Brecht, Flann O'Brien, Emily Bronte, Anthony Burgess, William S. Burroughs, Lord Byron
Constantine Cavafy, Miguel Cervantes, John Cheever , Agatha Christie, Flannery O’Connor, Michael Crichton
Roald Dahl, Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, Joan Didion, Isak Dinesen, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Arthur Conan Doyle
T. S. Eliot
William Faulkner
Jean Genet, Robert Graves
Dashiell Hammett
Knut Hamsun, Thomas Hardy, William Ernest Henley, O. Henry, Patricia Highsmith, Russell Hoban, Friedrich Holderlin, Victor Hugo
Henrik Ibsen
Henry James, Robinson Jeffers, Samuel Johnson, Ben Jonson, James Joyce, Ernst Junger
Franz Kafka, Emmanuel Kant, Nikos Kazantzakis, John Keats
Charles Lamb, Philip Larkin, D. H. Lawrence, Jack London
Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, John Milton, Yukio Mishima
Vladimir Nabokov, Gerard de Nerval
Petrarch, Sylvia Plath, Alexander Pope, Ezra Pound, Terry Pratchett, Abbe Prevost, Marcel Proust, Alexander Pushkin
Francois Rabelais, Arthur Rimbaud, Christina Rossetti
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Saki, Siegfried Sassoon, William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Sophocles, Laurence Sterne, Wallace Stevens, August Strindberg, Jonathan Swift, A. C. Swinburne
Dylan Thomas, James Thurber, Leo Tolstoy, Anthony Trollope
Walt Whitman, Ludwig Wittgenstein, P. G. Wodehouse, Virginia Woolf
1)
I was a hoplite at Marathon. (My brother won heroic renown there. Chasing the fleeing Persians, he grabbed one of their galleys and got his hand cut off.)
I died when an eagle dropped a tortoise on my head, mistaking it for a rock. Could have happened to anyone. (Anyone as bald as me, anyway.)
2)
My brief stint as a teacher did not go well. I perhaps didn’t endear myself to my pupils when I told them that I liked the school dog better than any of them.
3)
I kept snails as pets, sometimes avoiding quarantine by smuggling them through Customs in my bra.
4)
I served four years hard labour in Siberia, where I was only allowed one book — the New Testament. (I did, however, chance upon a Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield in the prison hospital.)
5)
I was exactly 5' tall.
When I was five years old my mother gave me a notebook and said I should stop whining and learn to amuse myself by writing down my thoughts.
The first entry is an account of a woman who believed herself to be freezing to death in the Arctic night, only to find, when day broke, that she had stumbled onto the Sahara Desert, where she would die of the heat before lunch.
81)
I was not a teetotaller. Legend has it that I died when I saw the moon reflected photogenically in a river and fell in trying to embrace it.
82)
Aged 82, on the point of death, I left my house secretly (possibly to get away from my wife, from whom I had grown estranged).
I died in a railway station a hundred miles from home.
83)
Worried about my daughter’s sanity, I took her to Carl Jung. His diagnosis: “You are both submerged in the same water, but you are swimming, she is drowning.”
She spent much of her life institutionalised. On being told of my death her response was “What is he doing underground, that idiot?”
84)
I fatally shot my wife in the head attempting a party trick.
85)
Three of my brothers were called George Washington, Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson.
Twenty-five years after his death, Edgar Allan Poe’s remains were disinterred and reburied in a more fitting style. Despite having recently suffered a stroke, I made the journey to Baltimore. I was the only literary figure at the ceremony.
82 is Tolstoy
83 might be James Joyce?
This was neat. I liked it
>8
C.S. Lewis? >9
Kazantzakis >19
Petrarch? >20
Jung, possibly. He certainly built a tower for himself. >21
Ezra Pound >39
Faulkner? >41
Proust >70
D'annunzio >73
De Sade, though I'm not certain. He's just the only author I can think of who did this. >76
Mishima >83
Joyce >91
Hemingway.
>8 >C.S. Lewis?
Nope, no CSL in the author list. This one has already been ID'd (Kafka).
>9 >Kazantzakis
Correct. Like several writers he was a weird mixture of left- and right-wing philosophy.
>19 >Petrarch?
Correct, but someone else already got it.
>20 >Jung, possibly.
No Jung in the author list. >He certainly built a tower for himself.
I didn't know that. Would have been cute if he had made it out of ivory.
>21 >Ezra Pound
Correct. I thought this would be one of the first to go, with the treason/insanity thing.
>39 >Faulkner?
Haha, I guess this is a reference to The Sound and the Fury. Not correct though.
>41 >Proust
Correct.
>70 >D'annunzio
Correct. Sadly his life was much more interesting than his books.
>73 >De Sade, though I'm not certain. He's just the only author I can think of who did this.
No De Sade in the author list, although supposedly he did sort of combine this one and #93.
>76 >Mishima
Right, although you're not the first.
>83 >Joyce
As above.
>91 >Hemingway.
Nope, no EH in the author list. This is someone who churned out loads of big novels.
6)
When I was six I made the national news with a chicken I had trained to walk backwards.
‘Everything since then has been an anticlimax,’ I said.
I later raised ducks, ostriches, emus, toucans and peawieners.
7)
I was the inspiration for Long John Silver.
Not only this, but my daughter, greeting a certain visitor with the phrase ‘friendy-wendy’, gave him the name of his next heroine.
8)
When I was a child, a little girl I knew lost a favourite doll. To comfort her, I wrote her letters from the doll, who explained that she had left because she wanted to see the world.
9)
An admirer of both Nietzsche and Lenin, I once spent two years as a contemplative on Mount Athos.
I was nominated nine times for the Nobel Prize, losing in the last year of my life to Albert Camus by one vote.
My epitaph: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.”
10)
In 1910 I took part in a famous prank. A group of us dressed up as Abyssinian princes and persuaded the Royal Navy to give us a tour of their flagship, the battleship ‘Dreadnought’.
11)
My heavy drinking might have been partly a consequence of my father shooting my mother then himself when I was eleven and leaving me to walk in and discover the bodies.
I’m buried in Savannah. My gravestone is in the form of a bench. It has two inscriptions:
‘Cosmos Mariner — Destination Unknown’
and
‘Give my love to the world’.
12)
I had three daughters, none of whom I gave a good education.
I did, however, teach two of them to read to me (useful when I went blind).
The texts were mostly Greek and Latin, which they didn’t understand.
13)
When I was knighted I fashioned my own sword, acquiring iron ore and meteorite ore and learning to smelt and forge.
14)
I enlisted as a private in 1914 and was killed by a sniper two years later.
My last words being “Put that bloody cigarette out.”
15)
When writing a novel I would take the pages of the first draft and pin them around the walls of my room near the floor. Every time I revised a page I would move it higher up the wall. When all the pages were at eye level I would unpin them and send them off to the publisher.
96)
According to a 1796 London book of jests, I once saw a famous fellow-writer in a public convenience with a book in his hand, reading attentively, and told him I was sorry that his memory was so bad ‘he could not sh-t without a book’.
97)
As a result of my wife’s flirtations I got myself involved in a duel.
I spent the evening before the assignation playing chess. At one point, noticing my rival nearby, I said “This officer threatens to checkmate me; I shall have to kill him”, and took a knight off the board.
Sadly, things transpired otherwise.
98)
I was sold to a medical school by grave-robbers. Only after I was almost wholly dissected did someone recognize me.
99)
I died and was buried in France. Five years later my widow wanted my body exhumed and cremated and the ashes brought to her in New Mexico. However, when the man she dispatched on this errand found he would have to pay taxes on the ashes, he threw them into the Mediterranean, substituting dust the precise origin of which remains a mystery.
100)
Honouring a promise to my mother, I recited the Lord’s Prayer every night of my life.
Not knowing, as I put it, whether there was anybody at the other end of the line.
16)
At the height of my career I became owner of the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane.
When, disastrously, it burned down, I astonished everyone by drinking calmly and watching the blaze.
“Surely a man may be allowed to take a glass of wine by his own fireside?” I said.
17)
A keen motorist, I received England’s first recorded speeding fine.
I was a splendid fellow but a little credulous on some topics, most notably the existence of fairies.
18)
I was born on Dylan Thomas’s eighteenth birthday. And married on Bloom’s Day (June 16th).
During a year in America I was, according to my husband, constantly mortified by the number of abandoned shopping carts in the parking lot of the local A&P.
“She would fastidiously herd up the orphan trolleys and slip them back in their places, muttering into her cigarette about the state of mankind,” he said.
19)
I often wrote letters to long-dead authors. I was also a collector of classic manuscripts.
Once, after discovering some previously unknown works of Cicero, I wrote to tell him.
20)
As a twenty-year-old graduate student I was smitten by another student, three years older and the wife of a well-known local lawyer. I ran off with her, which caused something of a scandal. Eventually she divorced him and married me and I built us a fine house, learning the craft of stonemasonry in the process.
21)
I cut a flamboyant figure; an acquaintance decribed me wearing ‘trousers made of green billiard cloth, a pink coat, a blue shirt, a tie hand-painted by a Japanese friend, an immense sombrero, a flaming beard cut to a point, and a single, large blue earring.’
I escaped execution for treason by being declared insane.
22)
On my wedding night I tried to strangle my wife.
After she struggled free I explained to her that I’d had a nightmare and imagined she was my previous wife.
23)
I had a hand (at least partly) cut off at the Battle of Lepanto.
My date of death is recorded as April 23, 1616, which is exactly the same date as Shakespeare’s death, even though I died ten days earlier. (A result of the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar.)
24)
Whilst working as a tutor I fell in love with my employer’s wife. When our affair was discovered I was dismissed; some years later she died. Although I spent much of the next forty years insane, I assiduously preserved all her letters to me, which were published forty years after my own death.
25)
Hours after I died of throat cancer, my twenty-five volume diary was destroyed by one of my executors.
Its contents can only be guessed at, but my letters and other private writing are suggestive:
Prison for strikers,
Bring back the cat,
Kick out the Black folk,
How about that?
Trade with the Empire,
Ban the obscene,
Lock up the commies,
God save the Queen.
26)
My first novel was accepted for publication by Longman’s on the recommendation of Graham Greene.
Sadly, when I sent them my second, a year later, Greene was no longer with them, and they rejected it.
I put the manuscript on the sideboard in my dining-room where it sat in plain sight for twenty-six years.
It was published shortly after I died.
27)
At school I was disliked for various reasons. At one point a teacher spoke to me privately and said that I might get on better with the other boys if I didn’t turn up at the gates in a chauffeured limousine. He suggested I have the car drop me just a few hundred yards away and walk in like a normal child.
Needless to say I spurned his plebian drivel.
28)
I used the money from my Nobel Prize to publish Ibsen in English.
I thought English spelling was ridiculous and left a large sum in my will to be used on making it more systematic.
29)
Orson Welles venerated me, filming one of my stories and writing a screenplay for another. He once came to Copenhagen to pay his respects, but lost his nerve, stayed in an hotel for three days and then went home.
I probably died of self-starvation.
30)
As a child I was shot in the eye with a bow and arrow by my brother, eventually going almost completely blind.
My drawings were once described as ‘pre-intentionalist’, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them occurred to me.
One of my most celebrated cartoons came about when I messed up the perspective of a flight of stairs and had to turn it into a book-case.
>One of my most celebrated cartoons came about when I messed up the perspective of a flight of stairs and had to turn it into a book-case.
I thought this would narrow it down easily but I can't recognize anyone on the list from cartoons.
I'm going to take a stab in the dark and say the cartoon means one of the pictures that are in Roald Dahl books.
31)
After the opening performance of my first play I went out on stage expecting to receive an ovation, only to be greeted with such a storm of abuse that I never tackled the mode again.
One reason for my failure might be that I was competing with ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’.
People who have read my novels might perhaps think of another reason.
32)
When a famous singer gave a recital at my house I listened from another room, then sent her a glass of sherry via an intermediary, not wanting to risk actual eye contact.
33)
As a child in St. Louis, I walked to dancing classes with William Burroughs’ mother. Passing, on the way, Prufrock’s Furniture Store.
Ezra Pound edited my most famous work, removing such killer couplets as
Odors confected by the artful French
Disguise the good old hearty female stench.
34)
An aristocratic warrior-poet, I wrote a book about my experiments with ether, cocaine, hashish and mescaline.
I also took LSD with its inventor, Albert Hofmann.
35)
I once visited Dickens and stayed with him for five weeks, which was a lot longer than he intended or wanted. To my great astonishment and distress, he broke off all contact with me thereafter.
36)
My sixth wife was the same age as my oldest daughter.
I attended the dinner party held by Claus von Bülow after his ‘not guilty’ verdict. Upon hearing some details about the case, however, I left, saying that it looked as though he was actually innocent after all, which was boring.
37)
I laughed, I claim, only twice in my whole life (both times when I was alone).
I once refused to speak to anyone for an entire year.
38)
I am to date the only Nobel Laureate of literature who has played first-class cricket. (Left-handed batsman, left-arm medium-pace bowler, if you’re interested.)
In 1938 I was stabbed by a pimp in Paris. At a preliminary hearing I asked him why. He replied, “I don’t know sir, I’m sorry.” He seemed well-mannered and likeable, so I dropped the charges.
39)
I said of my most well-known work: ‘I was a good speller before I wrote that book; I no longer am but I can live with that.’
Anyone who has read it will understand.
40)
I once worked temporarily as a café dish-washer to keep the job for a friend who was unwell.
Unusually for a poet, I wrote little of importance before the age of forty.
A well-known author once described me as “standing at a slight angle to the universe”.
41)
As a child I jerk offd so much my father finally gave me money to visit a brothel. Once there, however, I knocked over an expensive ornament, lost momentum and left without a successful conclusion.
I then had the gall to ask for more money, saying the chances were ‘very low that anyone could be twice in one lifetime too flustered to screw.’
42)
When going for walks I would fill my pockets with sugar lumps for feeding horses.
During a period in Ireland I fed a seagull which came regularly to my window.
I had nephews fighting on both sides in WWII.
43)
I wrote the most-reprinted book in French literature.
After my stroke, a doctor performed an autopsy. He discovered that the stroke had not been fatal but the autopsy had been.
44)
I disappeared whilst flying a reconnaisance mission in 1944.
The wreckage of my plane was discovered off the coast of Marseille in 2000, but the cause of the crash remains unknown.
45)
I was a friend and fan of Swinburne. He gave me a copy of ‘Atalanta in Calydon’ which I praised as a ‘supreme masterpiece’.
I still pasted paper over two lines I considered blasphemous, though.
>After my stroke, a doctor performed an autopsy. He discovered that the stroke had not been fatal but the autopsy had been.
kek what a horrible way to go
46)
Owing to a deformity of the spine I was only 4'6". One of my most famous satirical works resulted in several threats. For a while thereafter, walking my Great Dane*, I carried pistols in my pockets.
* ‘Bounce’, if you’re interested.
47)
My wife was the model for the face on the United States dime and half-dollar. (Marrying her caused a serious rift with my father. She went bonkers, so maybe he had a point.)
I once got into a fist-fight with Ernest Hemingway, winning the silver medal.
48)
I was famous in my home town as a man of great learning and phenomenal memory — so much so that people used to test me with random questions as I walked around.
One day I was asked ‘What is the best breakfast?’
‘An egg’, I said.
A year later the same man, out of the blue, asked ‘With what?’
‘With salt,’ I answered, not breaking stride.
49)
I added ‘De’ to my surname to sound more aristocratic.
In 1703 I wrote a pamphlet suggesting that all nonconformist preachers (of which I was one) should be hanged.
The authorities, failing to enter into the playful spirit of the thing, had me imprisoned.
50)
I once had a brief romantic relationship with a sailor, resulting in an anal fissure which I made the subject of a prose poem.
51)
When I was awarded the Nobel Prize my wife bought for the occasion a beautiful dress which cost more than a year’s salary. However, it was very low-cut, which I could not condone. Despite her pleading I got some material and added it to the top to correct the error.
She wore the altered garment, but her spirits were dampened.
52)
I was only 5'2". My solution:
* Wearing platform shoes.
* Combing my hair in an upward sweep, re-combing it diligently every time I removed my hat. (Having glued a small mirror inside the hat for this purpose.)
53)
I virtually never bathed. My wife loyally supported my decision. “Mr. ——— ’s skin don’t dirt,” she explained.
A visitor once found us sitting nude in the garden reading Paradise Lost.
54)
My magnum opus features an alter ego called Henry.
Why Henry? Early in my second marriage my wife and I got to discussing our least-favourite names. Mine was Mabel, hers Henry. So for a while thereafter, lovingly, that’s what we called each other.
55)
When the U.S. army rejected me (5'5", what can you say?) I armed myself with a forged letter of reference and joined the Canadian Air Force.
54 Bukowski
76)
A male prostitute I once brought back to my room was slightly surprised to discover that I just wanted him to watch me pretending to commit suicide.
77)
In 1926, after the breakdown of my marriage, I disappeared for eleven days, becoming headline news. In my autobiography I made no reference to the event, which remains something of a mystery.
78)
I threw my Military Cross into the Mersey in disgust with the waste of war.
79)
In 1979, on the Dick Cavett show, I famously said of Lillian Hellman, “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.”
She promptly sued me. The case dragged on for years, but dying took much of the wind out of her sails.
80)
I would sometimes recite, like a mantra, a list of long-lived people, hoping to match them. (I reached eighty.)
I was so regular in my habits that my neighbours were said to set their clocks by the time I passed their windows on my daily walk.
51)
When I was awarded the Nobel Prize my wife bought for the occasion a beautiful dress which cost more than a year’s salary. However, it was very low-cut, which I could not condone. Despite her pleading I got some material and added it to the top to correct the error.
She wore the altered garment, but her spirits were dampened.
52)
I was only 5'2". My solution:
* Wearing platform shoes.
* Combing my hair in an upward sweep, re-combing it diligently every time I removed my hat. (Having glued a small mirror inside the hat for this purpose.)
53)
I virtually never bathed. My wife loyally supported my decision. “Mr. ——— ’s skin don’t dirt,” she explained.
A visitor once found us sitting nude in the garden reading Paradise Lost.
54)
My magnum opus features an alter ego called Henry.
Why Henry? Early in my second marriage my wife and I got to discussing our least-favourite names. Mine was Mabel, hers Henry. So for a while thereafter, lovingly, that’s what we called each other.
55)
When the U.S. army rejected me (5'5", what can you say?) I armed myself with a forged letter of reference and joined the Canadian Air Force.
56)
I wasn’t teetotal. Or faithful. Once on holiday, while I lay sunbathing, my wife wrote ‘I frick anything’ in lipstick on my back.
57)
When I went up to Cambridge, pets were not allowed. I brought a bear, explaining that it wasn’t a pet, being wild and quite savage.
It later bit me in the leg, vindicating my analysis.
58)
W. B. Yeats, visiting me at home, asked what I did when people sent me books to sign. I showed him a closet filled with books.
I was only a little over five feet tall . . . but Shaw, Kipling, Housman, and Stanley Baldwin were among my pallbearers.
An inspiration for manlets everywhere.
59)
When I was finally weaned away from brandy, I took to port (because Tennyson drank port).
Then burgundy, because of Dumas’s Musketeers.
Finally ale, because of Shakespeare.
A friend sometimes hid my shoes to try to keep me from drinking.
60)
Although eccentric and bohemian in many ways, I had a strong moral sense. Typically, when my contemporaries did not want to be disturbed, they would have their servants tell callers they were ‘not at home’. I, however, considered it wrong to ask anyone to tell a deliberate lie. Eventually I hit on a cunning solution. I would leave ostentatiously by the front door, go around the back, let myself in quietly and sneak upstairs to my room. My servant, thinking I was still out, would turn callers away with no damage to his moral character.
61)
A gifted medical student, I originally intended to be a surgeon, but left my studies at Guy’s after two years, having received just an apothecary licence.
I enjoyed sleeping in so much I wrote a poem about it.
62)
I lost the manuscript of one of my most celebrated works in a pub and told a member of the BBC he could have it if he could find it.
This lead to a precedent lawsuit on the precise nature of a ‘gift’.
63)
One of my professional assignments was catching a man who had stolen a Ferris Wheel.
I once got into an argument with William Faulkner over ‘The Magic Mountain’. (He admired it; I thought it was terrible.)
64)
Although I grew up in poverty, I did grow up. 6'4", to be precise.
At the age of twenty I was arrested for throwing a rock through a police station window. I explained that I wanted to go to prison, where they feed you.
I committed suicide with a .44 Magnum. It’s not known exactly when, because my body wasn’t found for a month.
65)
Between the wars I got into a fraught menage-a-trois with a certain hysterical and egotistic poetess and another man. Things came to a head and she jumped out of a window. I decided the honourable thing was to follow her, but I jumped out of a slightly lower window. I was bruised; she was paralyzed.
66)
I was 6'6". At the outbreak of WWII, despite not really fitting into the wienerpit of a fighter plane, I joined the R.A.F., seeing action in Syria and Greece.
67)
My family’s house burned down in the fire that followed the San Francisco Earthquake, leaving us in straitened circumstances.
I educated myself at the public library. In my early teens I borrowed money from my mother, bought a boat and became an oyster pirate.
68)
I fought at Shiloh, Stones River, Chickamauga and Kenesaw Mountain. (How many civil war battles did David Foster Wallace fight in?)
My death remains a mystery. I wandered off somewhere, no-one knows where.
69)
I was 6'9".
I went to Harvard to study literature but got fed-up with a professor who was, I felt, giving me unfairly low grades. I submitted a George Orwell essay under my own name and received a B-minus, whereupon I switched my major to medicine.
70)
I lost an eye in combat in the Italian air force in World War I, which at least gave me the chance to wear a dashing eyepatch.
I seduced over ten thousand women. (So I claim, anyway. It was definitely a lot.)
What was my secret, you ask? I did own a pair of shoes with erect penises on them. Perhaps that was it.
>69) >Michael Crichton.
Correct. >The essay story got reused . . .
I've heard several variants of it, and some might well be true. e.g. The same essay getting submitted to two different professors and receiving wildly different grades, etc.
71)
I wasn’t teetotal, or the easiest person to live with. One evening was particularly fraught. The next morning I went into the bathroom to find a message in lipstick from my daughter on the mirror:
D-e-r-e Daddy, don’t leave us.
I put it in a story.
72)
When I visited America I met Edgar Allan Poe and told him all about Grip, my pet raven, after which he left with a trochaic sort of gleam in his eye.
73)
During one of my spells in prison I was given brown paper, supposedly for making bags. I used it to write an erotic fictionalized autobiography to faciliate masturbation. When this was confiscated I wrote it out again. The second version was not discovered and on release I took it with me and got it published.
74)
I lived with my sister, who stabbed her mother to death and was in and out of an institution all her life.
Whenever her sanity seemed to be on the wane, I calmly led her back into custody.
75)
Whilst working as literary critic for the Yorkshire Post, I reviewed one of my own novels (published under a pseudonym). I took pains not to be too laudatory:
“This is, in many ways, a dirty book. It is full of bowel-blasts and flatulent borborygms, emetic meals [...] and halitosis. It may well make some people sick... It turns sex, religion, the State into a series of laughing-stocks. The book itself is a laughing-stock.”
Despite this (and despite pointing out that Walter Scott, among others, reviewed his own books), I was fired.
76)
A male prostitute I once brought back to my room was slightly surprised to discover that I just wanted him to watch me pretending to commit suicide.
77)
In 1926, after the breakdown of my marriage, I disappeared for eleven days, becoming headline news. In my autobiography I made no reference to the event, which remains something of a mystery.
78)
I threw my Military Cross into the Mersey in disgust with the waste of war.
79)
In 1979, on the Dick Cavett show, I famously said of Lillian Hellman, “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.”
She promptly sued me. The case dragged on for years, but dying took much of the wind out of her sails.
80)
I would sometimes recite, like a mantra, a list of long-lived people, hoping to match them. (I reached eighty.)
I was so regular in my habits that my neighbours were said to set their clocks by the time I passed their windows on my daily walk.
81)
I was not a teetotaller. Legend has it that I died when I saw the moon reflected photogenically in a river and fell in trying to embrace it.
82)
Aged 82, on the point of death, I left my house secretly (possibly to get away from my wife, from whom I had grown estranged).
I died in a railway station a hundred miles from home.
83)
Worried about my daughter’s sanity, I took her to Carl Jung. His diagnosis: “You are both submerged in the same water, but you are swimming, she is drowning.”
She spent much of her life institutionalised. On being told of my death her response was “What is he doing underground, that idiot?”
84)
I fatally shot my wife in the head attempting a party trick.
85)
Three of my brothers were called George Washington, Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson.
Twenty-five years after his death, Edgar Allan Poe’s remains were disinterred and reburied in a more fitting style. Despite having recently suffered a stroke, I made the journey to Baltimore. I was the only literary figure at the ceremony.
86)
When I killed an actor in a duel I got the sentence reduced from possible execution to branding on the thumb by pleading ‘benefit of clergy’ (showing I could read and write Greek and Latin).
87)
My will consisted of one line: “I have nothing, I owe a great deal, and the rest I leave to the poor.”
88)
At the age of eighty-eight (foreshadowing Lonesome Dove) I died of gangrene when I refused to have an injured leg amputated.
89)
When I was almost ninety, my sons tried to have me declared incompetent.
I won an easy dismissal by reading to the jury from the play I was currently finishing.
90)
Once, on holiday, wanting to know how my latest novel was selling, I sent my publishers the following message:
>89)
I believe this is Sophocles. There's not many that could be him on account of how ancient he is plus plays not novels or poems but this sounds familiar to me.
>89) >I believe this is Sophocles.
Correct. Oedipus at Colonus being the play. (I have a vague feeling there's a similar story about Knut Hamsun — someone tried to prove him insane and he used one of his novels as proof he wasn't. That's not the Knut Hamsun story in this quiz, though.)
91)
I rose each morning at 5:30 and wrote for three hours.
I would place my watch on the desk, to be sure of turning out 250 words every fifteen minutes.
If I finished a book before my day’s quota was met, I immediately started a new one.
Writer’s block is for babies.
92)
I fled to South America when indicted for embezzlement, but returned and surrendered to the authorities when I learned my wife was dying of tuberculosis.
Visitors to my grave commonly leave a tribute of $1.87 in change (a sum which has a particular significance in my most famous story).
93)
I once wrote a poem while sitting in a bar.
Using my own excrement as ink.
94)
I had a terror of being buried alive. When I died (of a stroke) an attending doctor, as per my wishes, drove a stiletto through my heart.
95)
I had a pet lobster which I took for walks in Paris.
Tibault, he was called, if you’re interested.
I had a fondness for the species, considering them ‘peaceful, serious creatures’.
Laugh all you like, but Goethe preferred my translation of Faust to his original.
96)
According to a 1796 London book of jests, I once saw a famous fellow-writer in a public convenience with a book in his hand, reading attentively, and told him I was sorry that his memory was so bad ‘he could not sh-t without a book’.
97)
As a result of my wife’s flirtations I got myself involved in a duel.
I spent the evening before the assignation playing chess. At one point, noticing my rival nearby, I said “This officer threatens to checkmate me; I shall have to kill him”, and took a knight off the board.
Sadly, things transpired otherwise.
98)
I was sold to a medical school by grave-robbers. Only after I was almost wholly dissected did someone recognize me.
99)
I died and was buried in France. Five years later my widow wanted my body exhumed and cremated and the ashes brought to her in New Mexico. However, when the man she dispatched on this errand found he would have to pay taxes on the ashes, he threw them into the Mediterranean, substituting dust the precise origin of which remains a mystery.
100)
Honouring a promise to my mother, I recited the Lord’s Prayer every night of my life.
Not knowing, as I put it, whether there was anybody at the other end of the line.
A fine haul. This one might be wrapped up by tea-time.
>4 is Dostoevsky >8 is Kafka >33 is T.S Elliot >48 is Dante >72 is Dickens >76 is Mishima >80 is Kant >97 is Pushkin
All correct. Some easier than others (Prufrock obviously a big hint on #33). The Kafka anecdote is fairly obscure I think.
[...]
Also I've never heard that legend but 81 sounds like how Li Bai would go out.
>81 >sounds like how Li Bai would go out.
Sounds like and is. (This is admittedly one of the slightly suspicious ones. If someone saw it, why didn't they try to help him? It was in the Yangtze River, which is pretty deep I suppose.)
By far my favourite of your quizzes anon. Some of these are extremely hilarious, even more considered they are most likely real.
6) is Flannery O Connor
86) is A something Johnson, british poet whose name I can't remember but he seemed fat in his portrait
92) If it isn't O Henry then I'll be darned
68) Sounds like the guy who wrote the Devil's Dictionary. Bierce? I remember he fricked off to Mexico during the 1900s never to be seen again
44) is Exupery. He was flying a P38
23) Is Shakespeare. (iykyk)
Some of these are absolutely hilarious. 10, 27, 35, 70, 76, 91, and 97 are proof of truth being weirder than fiction >36
holy frick based
>The girl has $1.87 left in "The Gift Of The Magi".
I knew about his escape to South America, and wasn't so sure about the amount, but I imagined it was from the Magi.
Anyways. I hate inflation
4 — Dostoevsky, I believe.
10 — Virginia Woolf. That group whose name I forget was famous for its pranks.
17 — Arthur Doyle? He was fooled by some photographs of fairies, which were simply cardboard cutouts. Didn't know about his interest in motoring.
19 — Petrarch.
23 — Cervantes served at Lepanto and was for seven years a slave to the Ottomans, so I presume it was him.
33 — The Waste Land is dedicated to il miglior fabbro, Ezra Pound, and I know that he cut so much of IV — Death by Water that Eliot asked whether it was necessary to keep even the short except that remains, to which he insisted that it was absolutely essential to the meaning of the poem.
46 — Alexander Pope.
76 — Yukio Mishima. This one's easy because this anecdote gets so memed around here.
I am ashamed that I don't know more of these.
>4 — Dostoevsky >33 — The Waste Land Eliot >76 — Yukio Mishima
But the rest are yours:
>10 — Virginia Woolf. That group whose name I forget was famous for its pranks.
It was organized by an undergraduate friend of hers I think.
>17 — Arthur Doyle? He was fooled by some photographs of fairies, which were simply cardboard cutouts. Didn't know about his interest in motoring.
Correct, Mr. Sherlock Holmes himself.
>19 — Petrarch.
Right. One of the harder ones I thought.
>23 — Cervantes served at Lepanto and was for seven years a slave to the Ottomans, so I presume it was him.
Correct. I think his recorded "day of death" was actually his day of burial, but it did hit the change-over in calendar.
6. Flannery O' Connor
15. P. G. Wodehouse
29. Miguel Cervantes
34. Ernest Junger
35. Hans Christian Andersen
47.Wallace Stevens
68. Ambrose 'Bitter' Bierce
84.William S. Burroughs
A couple of these have already been identified: >6. Flannery O' Connor >68. Ambrose 'Bitter' Bierce
This one is wrong in an interesting way: >29. Miguel Cervantes
Cervantes has already been found (#23). You're right that MUAHHH THE FRENCH CHAMPAGNE spent years trying to film Don Quixote. But he never tried to visit Cervantes, owing to being born about three hundred years too late.
All these are right and you're the first: >15. P. G. Wodehouse >34. Ernest Junger >35. Hans Christian Andersen >47.Wallace Stevens >84.William S. Burroughs
I'll soon have to abandon my policy of giving animated gifs for multiple answers.
>81 >Li Bao
Correct, (although someone else already got it).
>43 >Rimbaud?
Nope. The "most reprinted book" thing is a sort of hint— he is quite an old writer (so his book has had a long time to get reprinted in).
You don’t have to be bonkers to be a great writer, but your biographer needs *something* to work with. Unusual life experiences, eccentric hobbies, or at just an amusing anecdote or two.
One hundred more-or-less believable factlets to attribute. Hints on request.
The authors:
Aeschylus, Conrad Aiken, Dante Alighieri, Kingsley Amis, Hans Christian Andersen, Gabriele D’Annunzio, W. H. Auden
Li Bai (Li Po), Samuel Beckett, John Berryman, Ambrose Bierce, William Blake, Jorge Luis Borges, Richard Brautigan, Bertolt Brecht, Flann O'Brien, Emily Bronte, Anthony Burgess, William S. Burroughs, Lord Byron
Constantine Cavafy, Miguel Cervantes, John Cheever , Agatha Christie, Flannery O’Connor, Michael Crichton
Roald Dahl, Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, Joan Didion, Isak Dinesen, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Arthur Conan Doyle
T. S. Eliot
William Faulkner
Jean Genet, Robert Graves
Dashiell Hammett
Knut Hamsun, Thomas Hardy, William Ernest Henley, O. Henry, Patricia Highsmith, Russell Hoban, Friedrich Holderlin, Victor Hugo
Henrik Ibsen
Henry James, Robinson Jeffers, Samuel Johnson, Ben Jonson, James Joyce, Ernst Junger
Franz Kafka, Emmanuel Kant, Nikos Kazantzakis, John Keats
Charles Lamb, Philip Larkin, D. H. Lawrence, Jack London
Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, John Milton, Yukio Mishima
Vladimir Nabokov, Gerard de Nerval
Petrarch, Sylvia Plath, Alexander Pope, Ezra Pound, Terry Pratchett, Abbe Prevost, Marcel Proust, Alexander Pushkin
Francois Rabelais, Arthur Rimbaud, Christina Rossetti
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Saki, Siegfried Sassoon, William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Sophocles, Laurence Sterne, Wallace Stevens, August Strindberg, Jonathan Swift, A. C. Swinburne
Dylan Thomas, James Thurber, Leo Tolstoy, Anthony Trollope
Walt Whitman, Ludwig Wittgenstein, P. G. Wodehouse, Virginia Woolf
1)
I was a hoplite at Marathon. (My brother won heroic renown there. Chasing the fleeing Persians, he grabbed one of their galleys and got his hand cut off.)
I died when an eagle dropped a tortoise on my head, mistaking it for a rock. Could have happened to anyone. (Anyone as bald as me, anyway.)
2)
My brief stint as a teacher did not go well. I perhaps didn’t endear myself to my pupils when I told them that I liked the school dog better than any of them.
3)
I kept snails as pets, sometimes avoiding quarantine by smuggling them through Customs in my bra.
4)
I served four years hard labour in Siberia, where I was only allowed one book — the New Testament. (I did, however, chance upon a Pickwick Papers and David Copperfield in the prison hospital.)
5)
I was exactly 5' tall.
When I was five years old my mother gave me a notebook and said I should stop whining and learn to amuse myself by writing down my thoughts.
The first entry is an account of a woman who believed herself to be freezing to death in the Arctic night, only to find, when day broke, that she had stumbled onto the Sahara Desert, where she would die of the heat before lunch.
1 is Aeschylus
82 is Tolstoy
83 might be James Joyce?
This was neat. I liked it
>1 is Aeschylus
Correct. If the tortoise thing isn’t true, it should be. Terry Pratchett stole it for Small Gods, as I recall.
>82 is Tolstoy
Right. He really didn’t treat his wife very well.
>83 might be James Joyce?
Correct.
>8
C.S. Lewis?
>9
Kazantzakis
>19
Petrarch?
>20
Jung, possibly. He certainly built a tower for himself.
>21
Ezra Pound
>39
Faulkner?
>41
Proust
>70
D'annunzio
>73
De Sade, though I'm not certain. He's just the only author I can think of who did this.
>76
Mishima
>83
Joyce
>91
Hemingway.
>8
>C.S. Lewis?
Nope, no CSL in the author list. This one has already been ID'd (Kafka).
>9
>Kazantzakis
Correct. Like several writers he was a weird mixture of left- and right-wing philosophy.
>19
>Petrarch?
Correct, but someone else already got it.
>20
>Jung, possibly.
No Jung in the author list.
>He certainly built a tower for himself.
I didn't know that. Would have been cute if he had made it out of ivory.
>21
>Ezra Pound
Correct. I thought this would be one of the first to go, with the treason/insanity thing.
>39
>Faulkner?
Haha, I guess this is a reference to The Sound and the Fury. Not correct though.
>41
>Proust
Correct.
>70
>D'annunzio
Correct. Sadly his life was much more interesting than his books.
>73
>De Sade, though I'm not certain. He's just the only author I can think of who did this.
No De Sade in the author list, although supposedly he did sort of combine this one and #93.
>76
>Mishima
Right, although you're not the first.
>83
>Joyce
As above.
>91
>Hemingway.
Nope, no EH in the author list. This is someone who churned out loads of big novels.
The shoes of #70 if anyone's interested.
6)
When I was six I made the national news with a chicken I had trained to walk backwards.
‘Everything since then has been an anticlimax,’ I said.
I later raised ducks, ostriches, emus, toucans and peawieners.
7)
I was the inspiration for Long John Silver.
Not only this, but my daughter, greeting a certain visitor with the phrase ‘friendy-wendy’, gave him the name of his next heroine.
8)
When I was a child, a little girl I knew lost a favourite doll. To comfort her, I wrote her letters from the doll, who explained that she had left because she wanted to see the world.
9)
An admirer of both Nietzsche and Lenin, I once spent two years as a contemplative on Mount Athos.
I was nominated nine times for the Nobel Prize, losing in the last year of my life to Albert Camus by one vote.
My epitaph: “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.”
10)
In 1910 I took part in a famous prank. A group of us dressed up as Abyssinian princes and persuaded the Royal Navy to give us a tour of their flagship, the battleship ‘Dreadnought’.
11)
My heavy drinking might have been partly a consequence of my father shooting my mother then himself when I was eleven and leaving me to walk in and discover the bodies.
I’m buried in Savannah. My gravestone is in the form of a bench. It has two inscriptions:
‘Cosmos Mariner — Destination Unknown’
and
‘Give my love to the world’.
12)
I had three daughters, none of whom I gave a good education.
I did, however, teach two of them to read to me (useful when I went blind).
The texts were mostly Greek and Latin, which they didn’t understand.
13)
When I was knighted I fashioned my own sword, acquiring iron ore and meteorite ore and learning to smelt and forge.
14)
I enlisted as a private in 1914 and was killed by a sniper two years later.
My last words being “Put that bloody cigarette out.”
15)
When writing a novel I would take the pages of the first draft and pin them around the walls of my room near the floor. Every time I revised a page I would move it higher up the wall. When all the pages were at eye level I would unpin them and send them off to the publisher.
>13
Terry Pratchett
>100
Borges
These threads are always fun, thanks op
Frick. Borges seems so obvious now that you pointed it out. I even just read his Library of Babel recently.
>13
>Terry Pratchett
Correct. I wonder who got the sword when he died. Probably worth a fair bit.
>100
>Borges
Also correct.
16)
At the height of my career I became owner of the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane.
When, disastrously, it burned down, I astonished everyone by drinking calmly and watching the blaze.
“Surely a man may be allowed to take a glass of wine by his own fireside?” I said.
17)
A keen motorist, I received England’s first recorded speeding fine.
I was a splendid fellow but a little credulous on some topics, most notably the existence of fairies.
18)
I was born on Dylan Thomas’s eighteenth birthday. And married on Bloom’s Day (June 16th).
During a year in America I was, according to my husband, constantly mortified by the number of abandoned shopping carts in the parking lot of the local A&P.
“She would fastidiously herd up the orphan trolleys and slip them back in their places, muttering into her cigarette about the state of mankind,” he said.
19)
I often wrote letters to long-dead authors. I was also a collector of classic manuscripts.
Once, after discovering some previously unknown works of Cicero, I wrote to tell him.
20)
As a twenty-year-old graduate student I was smitten by another student, three years older and the wife of a well-known local lawyer. I ran off with her, which caused something of a scandal. Eventually she divorced him and married me and I built us a fine house, learning the craft of stonemasonry in the process.
21)
I cut a flamboyant figure; an acquaintance decribed me wearing ‘trousers made of green billiard cloth, a pink coat, a blue shirt, a tie hand-painted by a Japanese friend, an immense sombrero, a flaming beard cut to a point, and a single, large blue earring.’
I escaped execution for treason by being declared insane.
22)
On my wedding night I tried to strangle my wife.
After she struggled free I explained to her that I’d had a nightmare and imagined she was my previous wife.
23)
I had a hand (at least partly) cut off at the Battle of Lepanto.
My date of death is recorded as April 23, 1616, which is exactly the same date as Shakespeare’s death, even though I died ten days earlier. (A result of the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar.)
24)
Whilst working as a tutor I fell in love with my employer’s wife. When our affair was discovered I was dismissed; some years later she died. Although I spent much of the next forty years insane, I assiduously preserved all her letters to me, which were published forty years after my own death.
25)
Hours after I died of throat cancer, my twenty-five volume diary was destroyed by one of my executors.
Its contents can only be guessed at, but my letters and other private writing are suggestive:
Prison for strikers,
Bring back the cat,
Kick out the Black folk,
How about that?
Trade with the Empire,
Ban the obscene,
Lock up the commies,
God save the Queen.
26)
My first novel was accepted for publication by Longman’s on the recommendation of Graham Greene.
Sadly, when I sent them my second, a year later, Greene was no longer with them, and they rejected it.
I put the manuscript on the sideboard in my dining-room where it sat in plain sight for twenty-six years.
It was published shortly after I died.
27)
At school I was disliked for various reasons. At one point a teacher spoke to me privately and said that I might get on better with the other boys if I didn’t turn up at the gates in a chauffeured limousine. He suggested I have the car drop me just a few hundred yards away and walk in like a normal child.
Needless to say I spurned his plebian drivel.
28)
I used the money from my Nobel Prize to publish Ibsen in English.
I thought English spelling was ridiculous and left a large sum in my will to be used on making it more systematic.
29)
Orson Welles venerated me, filming one of my stories and writing a screenplay for another. He once came to Copenhagen to pay his respects, but lost his nerve, stayed in an hotel for three days and then went home.
I probably died of self-starvation.
30)
As a child I was shot in the eye with a bow and arrow by my brother, eventually going almost completely blind.
My drawings were once described as ‘pre-intentionalist’, meaning that they were finished before the ideas for them occurred to me.
One of my most celebrated cartoons came about when I messed up the perspective of a flight of stairs and had to turn it into a book-case.
>One of my most celebrated cartoons came about when I messed up the perspective of a flight of stairs and had to turn it into a book-case.
I thought this would narrow it down easily but I can't recognize anyone on the list from cartoons.
I'm going to take a stab in the dark and say the cartoon means one of the pictures that are in Roald Dahl books.
Nope. It's a humorous writer who drew cartoons as well.
31)
After the opening performance of my first play I went out on stage expecting to receive an ovation, only to be greeted with such a storm of abuse that I never tackled the mode again.
One reason for my failure might be that I was competing with ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’.
People who have read my novels might perhaps think of another reason.
32)
When a famous singer gave a recital at my house I listened from another room, then sent her a glass of sherry via an intermediary, not wanting to risk actual eye contact.
33)
As a child in St. Louis, I walked to dancing classes with William Burroughs’ mother. Passing, on the way, Prufrock’s Furniture Store.
Ezra Pound edited my most famous work, removing such killer couplets as
Odors confected by the artful French
Disguise the good old hearty female stench.
34)
An aristocratic warrior-poet, I wrote a book about my experiments with ether, cocaine, hashish and mescaline.
I also took LSD with its inventor, Albert Hofmann.
35)
I once visited Dickens and stayed with him for five weeks, which was a lot longer than he intended or wanted. To my great astonishment and distress, he broke off all contact with me thereafter.
36)
My sixth wife was the same age as my oldest daughter.
I attended the dinner party held by Claus von Bülow after his ‘not guilty’ verdict. Upon hearing some details about the case, however, I left, saying that it looked as though he was actually innocent after all, which was boring.
37)
I laughed, I claim, only twice in my whole life (both times when I was alone).
I once refused to speak to anyone for an entire year.
38)
I am to date the only Nobel Laureate of literature who has played first-class cricket. (Left-handed batsman, left-arm medium-pace bowler, if you’re interested.)
In 1938 I was stabbed by a pimp in Paris. At a preliminary hearing I asked him why. He replied, “I don’t know sir, I’m sorry.” He seemed well-mannered and likeable, so I dropped the charges.
39)
I said of my most well-known work: ‘I was a good speller before I wrote that book; I no longer am but I can live with that.’
Anyone who has read it will understand.
40)
I once worked temporarily as a café dish-washer to keep the job for a friend who was unwell.
Unusually for a poet, I wrote little of importance before the age of forty.
A well-known author once described me as “standing at a slight angle to the universe”.
>37)
I haven't heard the not talking but but the never laughed is Jonathan Swift
>37)
>Jonathan Swift
Correct. There are lots of stories about him; he was definitely a bit odd.
41)
As a child I jerk offd so much my father finally gave me money to visit a brothel. Once there, however, I knocked over an expensive ornament, lost momentum and left without a successful conclusion.
I then had the gall to ask for more money, saying the chances were ‘very low that anyone could be twice in one lifetime too flustered to screw.’
42)
When going for walks I would fill my pockets with sugar lumps for feeding horses.
During a period in Ireland I fed a seagull which came regularly to my window.
I had nephews fighting on both sides in WWII.
43)
I wrote the most-reprinted book in French literature.
After my stroke, a doctor performed an autopsy. He discovered that the stroke had not been fatal but the autopsy had been.
44)
I disappeared whilst flying a reconnaisance mission in 1944.
The wreckage of my plane was discovered off the coast of Marseille in 2000, but the cause of the crash remains unknown.
45)
I was a friend and fan of Swinburne. He gave me a copy of ‘Atalanta in Calydon’ which I praised as a ‘supreme masterpiece’.
I still pasted paper over two lines I considered blasphemous, though.
>After my stroke, a doctor performed an autopsy. He discovered that the stroke had not been fatal but the autopsy had been.
kek what a horrible way to go
46)
Owing to a deformity of the spine I was only 4'6". One of my most famous satirical works resulted in several threats. For a while thereafter, walking my Great Dane*, I carried pistols in my pockets.
* ‘Bounce’, if you’re interested.
47)
My wife was the model for the face on the United States dime and half-dollar. (Marrying her caused a serious rift with my father. She went bonkers, so maybe he had a point.)
I once got into a fist-fight with Ernest Hemingway, winning the silver medal.
48)
I was famous in my home town as a man of great learning and phenomenal memory — so much so that people used to test me with random questions as I walked around.
One day I was asked ‘What is the best breakfast?’
‘An egg’, I said.
A year later the same man, out of the blue, asked ‘With what?’
‘With salt,’ I answered, not breaking stride.
49)
I added ‘De’ to my surname to sound more aristocratic.
In 1703 I wrote a pamphlet suggesting that all nonconformist preachers (of which I was one) should be hanged.
The authorities, failing to enter into the playful spirit of the thing, had me imprisoned.
50)
I once had a brief romantic relationship with a sailor, resulting in an anal fissure which I made the subject of a prose poem.
49 Daniel Defoe
54 Bukowski
77 Agatha Christie
>49 Daniel Defoe
Correct, although someone already got it.
>54 Bukowski
He did use the name Henry but he's not in the author list.
>77 Agatha Christie
Correct.
>He did use the name Henry but he's not in the author list.
I wondered why I hadn't heard of the anocdote about his least favorite name kek.
51)
When I was awarded the Nobel Prize my wife bought for the occasion a beautiful dress which cost more than a year’s salary. However, it was very low-cut, which I could not condone. Despite her pleading I got some material and added it to the top to correct the error.
She wore the altered garment, but her spirits were dampened.
52)
I was only 5'2". My solution:
* Wearing platform shoes.
* Combing my hair in an upward sweep, re-combing it diligently every time I removed my hat. (Having glued a small mirror inside the hat for this purpose.)
53)
I virtually never bathed. My wife loyally supported my decision. “Mr. ——— ’s skin don’t dirt,” she explained.
A visitor once found us sitting nude in the garden reading Paradise Lost.
54)
My magnum opus features an alter ego called Henry.
Why Henry? Early in my second marriage my wife and I got to discussing our least-favourite names. Mine was Mabel, hers Henry. So for a while thereafter, lovingly, that’s what we called each other.
55)
When the U.S. army rejected me (5'5", what can you say?) I armed myself with a forged letter of reference and joined the Canadian Air Force.
56)
I wasn’t teetotal. Or faithful. Once on holiday, while I lay sunbathing, my wife wrote ‘I frick anything’ in lipstick on my back.
57)
When I went up to Cambridge, pets were not allowed. I brought a bear, explaining that it wasn’t a pet, being wild and quite savage.
It later bit me in the leg, vindicating my analysis.
58)
W. B. Yeats, visiting me at home, asked what I did when people sent me books to sign. I showed him a closet filled with books.
I was only a little over five feet tall . . . but Shaw, Kipling, Housman, and Stanley Baldwin were among my pallbearers.
An inspiration for manlets everywhere.
59)
When I was finally weaned away from brandy, I took to port (because Tennyson drank port).
Then burgundy, because of Dumas’s Musketeers.
Finally ale, because of Shakespeare.
A friend sometimes hid my shoes to try to keep me from drinking.
60)
Although eccentric and bohemian in many ways, I had a strong moral sense. Typically, when my contemporaries did not want to be disturbed, they would have their servants tell callers they were ‘not at home’. I, however, considered it wrong to ask anyone to tell a deliberate lie. Eventually I hit on a cunning solution. I would leave ostentatiously by the front door, go around the back, let myself in quietly and sneak upstairs to my room. My servant, thinking I was still out, would turn callers away with no damage to his moral character.
61)
A gifted medical student, I originally intended to be a surgeon, but left my studies at Guy’s after two years, having received just an apothecary licence.
I enjoyed sleeping in so much I wrote a poem about it.
62)
I lost the manuscript of one of my most celebrated works in a pub and told a member of the BBC he could have it if he could find it.
This lead to a precedent lawsuit on the precise nature of a ‘gift’.
63)
One of my professional assignments was catching a man who had stolen a Ferris Wheel.
I once got into an argument with William Faulkner over ‘The Magic Mountain’. (He admired it; I thought it was terrible.)
64)
Although I grew up in poverty, I did grow up. 6'4", to be precise.
At the age of twenty I was arrested for throwing a rock through a police station window. I explained that I wanted to go to prison, where they feed you.
I committed suicide with a .44 Magnum. It’s not known exactly when, because my body wasn’t found for a month.
65)
Between the wars I got into a fraught menage-a-trois with a certain hysterical and egotistic poetess and another man. Things came to a head and she jumped out of a window. I decided the honourable thing was to follow her, but I jumped out of a slightly lower window. I was bruised; she was paralyzed.
66)
I was 6'6". At the outbreak of WWII, despite not really fitting into the wienerpit of a fighter plane, I joined the R.A.F., seeing action in Syria and Greece.
67)
My family’s house burned down in the fire that followed the San Francisco Earthquake, leaving us in straitened circumstances.
I educated myself at the public library. In my early teens I borrowed money from my mother, bought a boat and became an oyster pirate.
68)
I fought at Shiloh, Stones River, Chickamauga and Kenesaw Mountain. (How many civil war battles did David Foster Wallace fight in?)
My death remains a mystery. I wandered off somewhere, no-one knows where.
69)
I was 6'9".
I went to Harvard to study literature but got fed-up with a professor who was, I felt, giving me unfairly low grades. I submitted a George Orwell essay under my own name and received a B-minus, whereupon I switched my major to medicine.
70)
I lost an eye in combat in the Italian air force in World War I, which at least gave me the chance to wear a dashing eyepatch.
I seduced over ten thousand women. (So I claim, anyway. It was definitely a lot.)
What was my secret, you ask? I did own a pair of shoes with erect penises on them. Perhaps that was it.
>69)
Michael Crichton. The essay story got reused in a Rodney Dangerfield movie I think with Kurt Vonnegut
>69)
>Michael Crichton.
Correct.
>The essay story got reused . . .
I've heard several variants of it, and some might well be true. e.g. The same essay getting submitted to two different professors and receiving wildly different grades, etc.
71)
I wasn’t teetotal, or the easiest person to live with. One evening was particularly fraught. The next morning I went into the bathroom to find a message in lipstick from my daughter on the mirror:
D-e-r-e Daddy, don’t leave us.
I put it in a story.
72)
When I visited America I met Edgar Allan Poe and told him all about Grip, my pet raven, after which he left with a trochaic sort of gleam in his eye.
73)
During one of my spells in prison I was given brown paper, supposedly for making bags. I used it to write an erotic fictionalized autobiography to faciliate masturbation. When this was confiscated I wrote it out again. The second version was not discovered and on release I took it with me and got it published.
74)
I lived with my sister, who stabbed her mother to death and was in and out of an institution all her life.
Whenever her sanity seemed to be on the wane, I calmly led her back into custody.
75)
Whilst working as literary critic for the Yorkshire Post, I reviewed one of my own novels (published under a pseudonym). I took pains not to be too laudatory:
“This is, in many ways, a dirty book. It is full of bowel-blasts and flatulent borborygms, emetic meals [...] and halitosis. It may well make some people sick... It turns sex, religion, the State into a series of laughing-stocks. The book itself is a laughing-stock.”
Despite this (and despite pointing out that Walter Scott, among others, reviewed his own books), I was fired.
76)
A male prostitute I once brought back to my room was slightly surprised to discover that I just wanted him to watch me pretending to commit suicide.
77)
In 1926, after the breakdown of my marriage, I disappeared for eleven days, becoming headline news. In my autobiography I made no reference to the event, which remains something of a mystery.
78)
I threw my Military Cross into the Mersey in disgust with the waste of war.
79)
In 1979, on the Dick Cavett show, I famously said of Lillian Hellman, “Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.”
She promptly sued me. The case dragged on for years, but dying took much of the wind out of her sails.
80)
I would sometimes recite, like a mantra, a list of long-lived people, hoping to match them. (I reached eighty.)
I was so regular in my habits that my neighbours were said to set their clocks by the time I passed their windows on my daily walk.
81)
I was not a teetotaller. Legend has it that I died when I saw the moon reflected photogenically in a river and fell in trying to embrace it.
82)
Aged 82, on the point of death, I left my house secretly (possibly to get away from my wife, from whom I had grown estranged).
I died in a railway station a hundred miles from home.
83)
Worried about my daughter’s sanity, I took her to Carl Jung. His diagnosis: “You are both submerged in the same water, but you are swimming, she is drowning.”
She spent much of her life institutionalised. On being told of my death her response was “What is he doing underground, that idiot?”
84)
I fatally shot my wife in the head attempting a party trick.
85)
Three of my brothers were called George Washington, Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson.
Twenty-five years after his death, Edgar Allan Poe’s remains were disinterred and reburied in a more fitting style. Despite having recently suffered a stroke, I made the journey to Baltimore. I was the only literary figure at the ceremony.
>I was not a teetotaller. Legend has it that I died when I saw the moon reflected photogenically in a river and fell in trying to embrace it.
Woolf?
Haha, a fun theory, but technically incorrect.
This one has already been answered as Li Bai. (And Virginia Woolf has been identified too — she's #10.)
86)
When I killed an actor in a duel I got the sentence reduced from possible execution to branding on the thumb by pleading ‘benefit of clergy’ (showing I could read and write Greek and Latin).
87)
My will consisted of one line: “I have nothing, I owe a great deal, and the rest I leave to the poor.”
88)
At the age of eighty-eight (foreshadowing Lonesome Dove) I died of gangrene when I refused to have an injured leg amputated.
89)
When I was almost ninety, my sons tried to have me declared incompetent.
I won an easy dismissal by reading to the jury from the play I was currently finishing.
90)
Once, on holiday, wanting to know how my latest novel was selling, I sent my publishers the following message:
“?”
to which they replied:
“!”
>89)
I believe this is Sophocles. There's not many that could be him on account of how ancient he is plus plays not novels or poems but this sounds familiar to me.
>89)
>I believe this is Sophocles.
Correct. Oedipus at Colonus being the play. (I have a vague feeling there's a similar story about Knut Hamsun — someone tried to prove him insane and he used one of his novels as proof he wasn't. That's not the Knut Hamsun story in this quiz, though.)
91)
I rose each morning at 5:30 and wrote for three hours.
I would place my watch on the desk, to be sure of turning out 250 words every fifteen minutes.
If I finished a book before my day’s quota was met, I immediately started a new one.
Writer’s block is for babies.
92)
I fled to South America when indicted for embezzlement, but returned and surrendered to the authorities when I learned my wife was dying of tuberculosis.
Visitors to my grave commonly leave a tribute of $1.87 in change (a sum which has a particular significance in my most famous story).
93)
I once wrote a poem while sitting in a bar.
Using my own excrement as ink.
94)
I had a terror of being buried alive. When I died (of a stroke) an attending doctor, as per my wishes, drove a stiletto through my heart.
95)
I had a pet lobster which I took for walks in Paris.
Tibault, he was called, if you’re interested.
I had a fondness for the species, considering them ‘peaceful, serious creatures’.
Laugh all you like, but Goethe preferred my translation of Faust to his original.
95 is Gérard de Nerval.
>95 is Gérard de Nerval
It is, although someone else got there first.
96)
According to a 1796 London book of jests, I once saw a famous fellow-writer in a public convenience with a book in his hand, reading attentively, and told him I was sorry that his memory was so bad ‘he could not sh-t without a book’.
97)
As a result of my wife’s flirtations I got myself involved in a duel.
I spent the evening before the assignation playing chess. At one point, noticing my rival nearby, I said “This officer threatens to checkmate me; I shall have to kill him”, and took a knight off the board.
Sadly, things transpired otherwise.
98)
I was sold to a medical school by grave-robbers. Only after I was almost wholly dissected did someone recognize me.
99)
I died and was buried in France. Five years later my widow wanted my body exhumed and cremated and the ashes brought to her in New Mexico. However, when the man she dispatched on this errand found he would have to pay taxes on the ashes, he threw them into the Mediterranean, substituting dust the precise origin of which remains a mystery.
100)
Honouring a promise to my mother, I recited the Lord’s Prayer every night of my life.
Not knowing, as I put it, whether there was anybody at the other end of the line.
My idea of Heaven: ‘a sort of library’.
Also I've never heard that legend but 81 sounds like how Li Bai would go out.
A fine haul. This one might be wrapped up by tea-time.
>4 is Dostoevsky
>8 is Kafka
>33 is T.S Elliot
>48 is Dante
>72 is Dickens
>76 is Mishima
>80 is Kant
>97 is Pushkin
All correct. Some easier than others (Prufrock obviously a big hint on #33). The Kafka anecdote is fairly obscure I think.
>81
>sounds like how Li Bai would go out.
Sounds like and is. (This is admittedly one of the slightly suspicious ones. If someone saw it, why didn't they try to help him? It was in the Yangtze River, which is pretty deep I suppose.)
By far my favourite of your quizzes anon. Some of these are extremely hilarious, even more considered they are most likely real.
6) is Flannery O Connor
86) is A something Johnson, british poet whose name I can't remember but he seemed fat in his portrait
92) If it isn't O Henry then I'll be darned
68) Sounds like the guy who wrote the Devil's Dictionary. Bierce? I remember he fricked off to Mexico during the 1900s never to be seen again
44) is Exupery. He was flying a P38
23) Is Shakespeare. (iykyk)
Some of these are absolutely hilarious. 10, 27, 35, 70, 76, 91, and 97 are proof of truth being weirder than fiction
>36
holy frick based
Another good haul.
>6) is Flannery O Connor
Correct. She called the peawiener the "king of birds".
>86) is A something Johnson, british poet whose name I can't remember but he seemed fat in his portrait
Right. Ben Jonson.
>92) If it isn't O Henry then I'll be darned
It's him. (The girl has $1.87 left in "The Gift Of The Magi".)
>68) Sounds like the guy who wrote the Devil's Dictionary. Bierce?
Ambrose Bierce, right.
>44) is Exupery. He was flying a P38
Correct. He was miles off course, which is why the original search didn't find him.
>23) Is Shakespeare. (iykyk)
Correct. Ben Jonson the guy with the book.
>Some of these are absolutely hilarious.
I like #22. It might just have won her over instantly.
>The girl has $1.87 left in "The Gift Of The Magi".
I knew about his escape to South America, and wasn't so sure about the amount, but I imagined it was from the Magi.
Anyways. I hate inflation
4 — Dostoevsky, I believe.
10 — Virginia Woolf. That group whose name I forget was famous for its pranks.
17 — Arthur Doyle? He was fooled by some photographs of fairies, which were simply cardboard cutouts. Didn't know about his interest in motoring.
19 — Petrarch.
23 — Cervantes served at Lepanto and was for seven years a slave to the Ottomans, so I presume it was him.
33 — The Waste Land is dedicated to il miglior fabbro, Ezra Pound, and I know that he cut so much of IV — Death by Water that Eliot asked whether it was necessary to keep even the short except that remains, to which he insisted that it was absolutely essential to the meaning of the poem.
46 — Alexander Pope.
76 — Yukio Mishima. This one's easy because this anecdote gets so memed around here.
I am ashamed that I don't know more of these.
A few of these someone already got:
>4 — Dostoevsky
>33 — The Waste Land Eliot
>76 — Yukio Mishima
But the rest are yours:
>10 — Virginia Woolf. That group whose name I forget was famous for its pranks.
It was organized by an undergraduate friend of hers I think.
>17 — Arthur Doyle? He was fooled by some photographs of fairies, which were simply cardboard cutouts. Didn't know about his interest in motoring.
Correct, Mr. Sherlock Holmes himself.
>19 — Petrarch.
Right. One of the harder ones I thought.
>23 — Cervantes served at Lepanto and was for seven years a slave to the Ottomans, so I presume it was him.
Correct. I think his recorded "day of death" was actually his day of burial, but it did hit the change-over in calendar.
>46 — Alexander Pope.
Right.
test
6. Flannery O' Connor
15. P. G. Wodehouse
29. Miguel Cervantes
34. Ernest Junger
35. Hans Christian Andersen
47.Wallace Stevens
68. Ambrose 'Bitter' Bierce
84.William S. Burroughs
A couple of these have already been identified:
>6. Flannery O' Connor
>68. Ambrose 'Bitter' Bierce
This one is wrong in an interesting way:
>29. Miguel Cervantes
Cervantes has already been found (#23). You're right that MUAHHH THE FRENCH CHAMPAGNE spent years trying to film Don Quixote. But he never tried to visit Cervantes, owing to being born about three hundred years too late.
All these are right and you're the first:
>15. P. G. Wodehouse
>34. Ernest Junger
>35. Hans Christian Andersen
>47.Wallace Stevens
>84.William S. Burroughs
I'll soon have to abandon my policy of giving animated gifs for multiple answers.
49: Daniel Defoe?
100 feels vaguely like Emily Dickinson.
>49: Daniel Defoe?
Of course.
>100 feels vaguely like Emily Dickinson.
Nope. She was very devout. She had no doubt whatsoever there was someone else at the other end of the line.
Lobster- Gerard de Nerval
Bear- Lord Byron
Innocent man boring/6th wife young- Mailer
Taxes on ashes, throw in water- DH Lawrence
All correct:
>Lobster- Gerard de Nerval
#95.
>Bear- Lord Byron
#57. One of the more well-known stories I think.
>Innocent man boring/6th wife young- Mailer
#36.
>Taxes on ashes, throw in water- DH Lawrence
#99.
Awesome thread
But damn I hate finding them late when all the ones I know have been answered
Bump. A couple of hints:
5, 42, 60, 74 wrote (primarily or exclusively) non-fiction.
22, 24, 40, 42, 43, 51, 52, 73, 87, 90, 93, 94, 100 wrote (primarily or exclusively) in languages other than English.
>MAD AS THE MIST AND SNOW
I looked this up, is it from a song or poem or something?
It's a poem by W. B. Yeats.
https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/mad-as-the-mist-and-snow/
I'll try to chip away some more
>81
Li Bao
>43
Rimbaud?
>81
>Li Bao
Correct, (although someone else already got it).
>43
>Rimbaud?
Nope. The "most reprinted book" thing is a sort of hint— he is quite an old writer (so his book has had a long time to get reprinted in).