Literary Rogues: A Scandalous History of Wayward Authors
3.5/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this ebook
Andrew Shaffer's Literary Rogues is an unflinching look at the bad behavior of some of our most beloved authors, from Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe, to Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, to Hunter S. Thompson and Bret Easton Ellis.
Literary Rogues is a wildly funny and illuminating history and analysis of the bad boys and girls of lit, from the author of Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love
Part nostalgia, part serious history of Western literary movements, Literary Rogues: A Scandalous History of Wayward Authors is a raucous celebration of oft-vilified writers and their work, brimming with interviews, research, and personality.
Andrew Shaffer
Andrew Shaffer is the author of Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love and, under the pen name Fanny Merkin, Fifty Shames of Earl Grey. His writing has appeared in such diverse publications as Mental Floss and Maxim. An Iowa native, Shaffer lives in Lexington, Kentucky, a magical land of horses and bourbon.
Read more from Andrew Shaffer
Literary Rogues: A Scandalous History of Wayward Authors Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Hope Never Dies: An Obama Biden Mystery Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Look Mom I'm a Poet (and So Is My Cat) Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like F*ck This: A Humorous Holiday Anthology Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Catsby: A Parody of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Mad, Mad Marjorie Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHope Rides Again: An Obama Biden Mystery Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsNot Today, Satan (Maybe Tomorrow) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsOh My Goth: Jokes for When You Feel Dead Inside Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to Literary Rogues
Related ebooks
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5To the Lighthouse Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDracula Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMen I'm Not Married To Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Curses, Inc. and Other Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I'm a Lebowski, You're a Lebowski: Life, The Big Lebowski, and What Have You Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: The 7 Secrets of Awakening the Highly Effective Four-Hour Giant, Today Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Candide Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSongs of Isolation: Dark Academia Poems Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Flowers of Evil Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAll Fall Down: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Awakening Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Marfa Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rude Talk in Athens: Ancient Rivals, the Birth of Comedy, and a Writer's Journey through Greece Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Dream Life of Balso Snell Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Chasing Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov's Little Girl All Over Again Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sixteen Satires Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Scale: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Manhattan Loverboy Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Double Life Is Twice as Good: Essays and Fiction Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSlouchers: The Novelization Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBrits, Beats and Outsiders Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Meowmorphosis Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone: The Essential Writing of Hunter S. Thompson Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Kurt Vonnegut's America Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Holy Barbarians Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
Literary Biographies For You
The Glass Castle: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Don't Panic: Douglas Adams & The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5People, Places, Things: My Human Landmarks Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dry: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Devil and Harper Lee Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Writing into the Wound: Understanding trauma, truth, and language Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: the heartfelt, funny memoir by a New York Times bestselling therapist Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Real Lolita: A Lost Girl, an Unthinkable Crime, and a Scandalous Masterpiece Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Lincoln Lawyer: A Mysterious Profile Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Moveable Feast Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Dad on Pills: Fatherhood and Mental Illness Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Incest: From "A Journal of Love": The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1932–1934 Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Writer's Diary Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Shakespeare: The World as Stage Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Writers and Their Notebooks Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Party Monster: A Fabulous But True Tale of Murder in Clubland Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5How to Murder Your Life: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5These Precious Days: Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Confessions of a Bookseller Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5James Baldwin: A Biography Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Very Best of Maya Angelou: The Voice of Inspiration Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Things I Should Have Told My Daughter: Lies, Lessons & Love Affairs Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love," The Unexpurgated Diary (1931–1932) of Anaïs Nin Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Literary Rogues
26 ratings6 reviews
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5My time would have been better spent skimming a few Wikipedia articles rather than reading Literary Rogues. Wikipedia would probably have been more accurate.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Interesting and engaging, but learned very few new things herein. Guess that might be saying more about me and how much I read about authors and writers and publishing et al.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5There was a time when writers were treated like and acted like rock stars. I knew about most of the writers in this book, so I didn't learn anything new. I did enjoy it, though and would recommend it to anyone who likes reading about the lives of writers.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5If you are a lit buff, there is nothing in these pages that will come as any surprise to you. The book is a fun, quick ride. Brief bios of all kinds of men (and a sprinkling of women) who led colorful and self-destructive lives that probably reduced their output by decades. Interspersed, this collection of addicts and train wrecks managed to write some of the greatest books in the world before departing this mortal coil.Opium and laudanum play a prominent role in many of these writers lives. Second place is alcohol with all the rest of the pharmacopia falling back to a distant third. Sprinkle in some serious mental health issues among this group and you pretty much have your rogues gallery.No bio is particularly long. A couple of pages is enough to hit the high points and to send you in the right direction if you want to delve further into an individual authors work and life. It's a whose who- from Poe, to Coleridge, to Fitzgerald and Hemingway and right on up to gonzo journalist and writer Hunter S. Thompson.If you are a throwback romantic hoping that massive amounts of heroin and alcohol will feed your genius, then maybe this work is an inspiration. If you are more of realist though, the romance of these authors addictions wears off quite quickly when you realize that but for their crutch, they could have written so much more. The true fun of the book is that it is a short read and its focus is on people who had a love affair with the written word. That is always and inspiration for any writer. It also helps to put in perspective the truth that most writers are not out there making a million dollars. Many times the work of these authors reached their greatest audience after their untimely deaths. Take heart – sobriety might just help you get your work out there. If not, you might be a rich corpse!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Very entertaining. Evidently being demented or finding a destructive addiction is a prerequisite to being a writer.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Literary Rogues consists of portraits of the 'bad boys' of literature, though some women, too, merit a place within these pages. These are the authors with wild lifestyles, drug habits, and an endless string of romantic relationships. Though not a history tome by any means, this relatively brief nonfiction book is a delightful light read for those curious about author biographies but not perhaps committed to a full length work on a particular author.
As a reader, I cannot help but be fascinate by authors and the lives that they live. Of course, most authors do not live lives radically different from other people. In our imaginations, though, they take on characteristics of their characters, of their narratives. Shaffer opens by relating a story from his youth, wherein he meets Marvel Comics writer Frank Castle. Shaffer had a number of expectations of what Castle would be like, and none of them came close to the reality. In Literary Rogues, Shaffer peers into the lives of some of the most famously vibrant, dramatic personalities in writing and shows both how exciting their lives were and how sad.
Literary Rogues will appeal to fans of general knowledge. If you love trivia, there are endless tidbits to be garnered from within these pages. For example, William S. Burroughs murdered his wife (in a drunken game of William Tell) and Norman Mailer stabbed his. Fun facts, no? Almost all of the wayward authors struggle with drug or alcohol abuse, often combined with mental disorders, like depression. It's really tragic the way these lives fell apart. I also find it odd that some lived to such old ages, though they partook of terrible life choices just as much as anyone else. The drugs and alcohol become so tied up in the creative process of writing that the habits are hard to shake, for fear of losing talent.
The time period ranges from the Marquis de Sade to James Frey. The earlier authors are covered chapter by chapter, with a brief rundown of their life and some of the wildest stories. As Shaffer moves forward in time, he begins interweaving more authors into each chapter, covering the generations and adding in more history, this seeming to be more where his passion lies. Though I can see why he switched up his style, I preferred the more organized method of tackling one author at a time. I also struggled a bit with the sections on the Beat Generation and Ken Kesey's group, since I took a college course on them and new most of the information already.
Shaffer's writing style is very readable, and he adds quite a bit of humor to subject matter which alternates between depressing and hilariously ridiculous. For an overview of some of the most sensational authors, Literary Rogues is a great choice, and, now that I know a bit more about these authors, I know which ones I want to research more extensively.