The other day a friend told me that the comic artist Joe Shuster, co-creator of Superman with Jerry Siegel, was at one point in his career involved in, um, much more explicit forms of drawing where such comics really resembled his famous DC characters. This makes me wonder if writers have done this kind of thing. Have any of you heard of interesting, odd, or weird facts about famous writers before or during their career?
many famous authors had not only shady pasts, but also presents, when they were at their peak of writing success... poe was an alcoholic drug addict... the fitzgeralds were libertine drunks... before writing the oz books, frank baum wrote inflammatory editorials calling for the 'total annihilation' of native americans... and literary lion martin amis is a widely-acknowledged 'serial philanderer'... writers are people... and people all too often are not the nicest of creatures...
I'm pretty sure you're confusing Poe with Van Gogh. But it wasn't his girlfriend, it was a prostitute he knew, and he gave it in person wrapped in newspaper.
That would be Van Gogh. EDIT: NINJA'D!!! At any rate, I heard that Stephen King was also an alcoholic. He wrote books where his protagonist was dealing with their alocoholism.
Hunter S. Thompson, prime example. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was Gonzo, not fiction! Apparently your friend reads Cracked.
This thread makes me a little confused, especially in terms of what we're calling "shady." I'm not sure I find addiction to be such, though my own issues with substance abuse may have a lot to do with that bias. Anyway, Cormac McCarthy said, "If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it's drinking." Pairing this alongside another beautiful line of his stating, "I'm not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing." We all have our vices, sometimes it's easier and more beneficial to embrace the "shady" than not.
