Even if you aren’t a big fan about reading, there are just some books and authors that everyone knows about. However, what if i told you that some of these had really fun stories behind them?
Here are some crazy/interesting facts about books and authors, and don’t forget to comment on which ones you found the most fascinating or hilarious:
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Agatha Christie disappeared for nearly two weeks in 1926, after her first husband told her he wanted a divorce. Her car was found abandoned, 15,000 volunteers undertook a manhunt, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle consulted a psychic. She was found in a hotel under an assumed name (borrowed from her husband’s mistress), and never offered any explanation, not even in her autobiography.
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After a severe car accident, Stephen King‘s lawyer purchased the vehicle that hit him, “to prevent it from appearing on eBay”. The car was later crushed in a car yard, and King was reportedly disappointed that he didn’t get to smash it himself.
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Jane Austen had a knack for brewing her own beer. She used molasses to give her brews a sweeter taste.
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When Ernest Hemingway’s favourite bar was scheduled for demolition, he reportedly tore a urinal from the wall in the men’s room and took it for his own, saying that he had “■■■■■■ so much money into it” that it was his by rights.
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Victor Hugo really struggled with procrastination (So relatable, right?). While writing The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, he had his servants take away all of his clothes so that he wouldn’t be tempted to go out during the day when he was supposed to be working, effectively forcing him to write in the nude.
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Daniel Defo had some seriously unsuccessful business ventures before he became a novelist. His perfume made from the secretions of cats’ bottoms might be the strangest though…
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Lord Byron had a LOT of pets, including: 10 Horses, 3 Monkeys, 3 Peacocks, 5 Cats, 8 Dogs, a Crane, a Falcon, a Crow and an Eagle.
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George Orwell borrowed the plot of 1984 from We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. It is a dystopian novel that Orwell reviewed in 1946. Orwell didn’t like the plot so he thought he would spice it up a bit.
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Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll was terrible at finances. Although he paid his debts on time, he would often overdraft upwards of £7,500. This is all the more ironic considering Carroll was a mathematics scholar at Oxford.
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Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud once attended a lecture given by American icon Mark Twain. The subject of Twain’s talk, however, had nothing to do with the intricacies of the human psyche. Twain’s central lecture topic was about a watermelon he stole as a child.
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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the inventor of the Sherlock Holmes series, had a very public friendship with master illusionist Harry Houdini. However, once Houdini heard that Doyle believed in spiritualism and thought Houdini had real magical powers, the friendship swiftly ended.
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J. R. R. Tolkien, a legendary author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, was known to be a ruthless prankster. He actually once dressed as an axe-wielding Anglo-Saxon warrior and chased his neighbor. Quite a disturbing sense of humor.