Nov 10, 2010
According to Bill Peschel, the world’s greatest authors are often canonized, raised up on pedestals and revered not only as artists, but people. Certainly every true writing genius must have lived up to their great name, right?
Peschel says that most of them did not. Writers Gone Wild, The Feuds, Frolics and Follies of Literature’s Great Adventurers, Drunkards, Lovers, Iconoclasts and Misanthropes is a revealing book about some of the world’s greatest writers behaving badly, including such bizarre, but true tales as:
· The night Dashiell Hammett hired a Chinese prostitute to break up S.J. Perelman’s marriage (and run off with his wife!)
· The night a drunken Dylan Thomas dodged machine-gun bullets
· Why Earnest Hemingway fought a book critic, a modernist poet, and Nazi subs (but not at the same time)
· The near-fatal trip Katherine Anne Porter took while high on marijuana in Mexico
· The day Virginia Woolf snuck onto a Royal Navy ship disguised as an Abyssinian prince
· And much more!