10 Facts All Book Snobs Know About These Famous Authors
by N/A, 9 years ago |
1 min read
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Writers might need to spend a lot of time in solitude in order to perfect their masterpieces, but they actually lived pretty interesting lives.
Sarah Stodola author of Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors, uncovered the intricacies of these writers lives. Some of it might surprise you.
1. Jack Kerouac
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Kerouac never learned how to drive. He moved to New York as a teenager and didn't need a car. During all of his adventures, he was never the one driving. That was usually his friend Neal Cassady.
2. David Foster Wallace
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Infinite Jest started as three seemingly disjointed stories. One was about a tennis prodigy and his family, the other was about a video that became a serious obsession and the last was about a man Wallace met in rehab.
3. Vladimir Nabokov
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Nabokov worked until he was 60 years old. He worked as a tutor, tennis coach and was a professor at Cornell University. He dedicated his time to writing full-time in 1958 after he had commercial success for Lolita.
4. Toni Morrison
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Toni Morrison was a professor at Howard University before she began her career as a writer. She joined a writing club for fun and the story she began writing there became her debut novel, "The Bluest Eye". She was 39 when it was published.
5. Zadie Smith
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It took Zadie Smith 2 years to write the first 20 pages of "On Beauty". She finished the rest of the book in 5 months.
6. James Joyce
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James Joyce left Ireland at age 22 and never came back. He moved to Italy and then wrote his famed work, "Ulysses" which takes place in Dublin.
7. Virginia Woolf
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Virginia Woolf's writing space was a mess. It was described as an “incredible muddle of objects†by writer Vita Sackville-West.
8. F. Scott Fitzgerald
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F. Scott Fitzgerald made $55,000 in today's dollars for each story he published. That was about $4,000 in the 1920s.
9. George Orwell
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The plot for "1984" was taken from a novel called "We." He reviewed the book for the Tribune. It was about a city made of glass that the government watched over. The two main characters fall in love and decide to rebel. 1984 was published 3 years later.
10. Franz Kafka
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Kafka never finished a novel in its entirety. Three of his books, The Castle, The Trial and Amerika were put together after his death. He asked his friend, Max Brod to destroy them.
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