Books Trivia | 100 facts & trivia about famous authors (part 2)

Who said writers are all about writing and nothing else? Well writers such as almost every artist, have some really weird aspects when it comes to their lives.

In case you read the first part you already know some facts about some of the most famous and well-recognized authors of the world. Well, now we are about to learn even more facts about some of the most famous writers in the world!

1. Lord Byron inherited from his mother her weight problem.
2. He was in a long relationship with his half-sister.
3. They even had one child.
4. There is such a thing as “Byromania” about being in something like a polyamorous relationship.
5. While Byron was studying in Cambridge, he was told that pets are not allowed, so he brought a… tamed bear!
6. In Byron’s house, a coffin stood at one end of the dining room, which Byron had turned into an indoor shooting gallery.
7. During his summer with the Shelleys at Lake Geneva in 1816, Byron suggested the group spend a rainy afternoon writing ghost stories.
8. Charles Dickens had a passion for hypnosis.
9. He attended a number of lectures on the practice of mesmerism.
10. Dickens also gave himself a number of unusual nicknames, including ‘The Sparkler of Albion,’ ‘The Inimitable,’ ‘Revolver’, and ‘Resurrectionist.’
11. Charles Dickens loved his pet raven, Grip, so much that when it died, he had it stuffed and mounted in his study.
12. Dickens suffered from OCD.
13. This is why he combed his hair 20 times a day and, when staying in hotels, would immediately rearrange all the furniture.
14. J.D. Salinger, most famous for A Catcher in the Rye, apparently drank his own urine.
15. He also spoke in tongues, according to a memoir written by his daughter.
16. Franz Kafka enjoyed visiting nudist camps but was known as ‘The Man in the Swimming Trunks’ as he refused to go fully nude.
17. Young Franz Kafka didn’t have many friends and assuaged his loneliness by reading the works of J.W. von Goethe, Blaise Pascal, Gustav Flaubert, and Soren Kierkegaard.
18. Before he became known as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature, Kafka lived in obscurity, working as an insurance clerk in his native Prague.
19. The insurance job didn’t generate enough money to allow Kafka to write full-time, so he and his friend Max Brod decided to supplement their income by writing a guidebook for tourists in Europe.
20. The adjective of his last name, Kafkaesque, implies a nightmarish world.
21. And though he created frightening images in his books, he was reportedly terrified by mice.
22. The apartment of Kafka’s most famous fictional character, Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis, had the same layout as the author’s real flat in Prague.
23. Kafka’s works were forbidden in his native Prague during communism because of “degenerative individualism”, nut the ban was lifted in 1989.
24. The author had an asteroid named after him in 1983.
25. It passes the Earth every 523 days.
26. According to Max Brod, Kafka never lied because Kafka believed in “absolute truthfulness.”
27. Kafka asked Brod to burn all his unpublished manuscripts after his death. Brod didn’t comply, publishing The Trial and other Kafka classics posthumously.
28. Ernest Hemingway was a professional bullfighter.
29. He also pioneered his own signature brand of rum.
30. His most beloved works include The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), and The Old Man and the Sea (1953).
31. Hemingway was awarded two Pulitzer prizes, for For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea.
32. These also earned him a Nobel prize.
33. His mother wanted a daughter, not a son and in order to placate herself after Ernest was born, she would dress him up in pink, flowery dresses, and call him “Ernestine”.
34. Hemingway participated in the Spanish Civil War and took part in the D-Day landings during the invasion of France during World War II.
35. Hemingway served as an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I.
36. He was a KGB spy.
37. Hemingway checked out F. Scott Fitzerald’s penis in the men’s rooms.
38. It is estimated he left behind over 8,000 personal and business letters.
39. Hemingway was the grandfather to two famous actresses, Mariel Hemingway and Margaux Hemingway.
40. He was married four times and dedicated a book to each wife during the time he was married to them.
41. He loved polydactyl cats (cats having six or more toes on each foot, instead of the usual five).
42. While vacationing in Africa, he survived two plane crashes in the span of two days.
43. Hemingway, in his lifetime, survived skin cancer, anthrax, malaria, dysentery, hepatitis, anemia, high blood pressure, a ruptured kidney, a ruptured spleen, a ruptured liver, pneumonia, a crushed vertebra, a fractured skull, and three-car crashes.
44. Hemingway refused to write for movies.
45. Actually, he disliked the screen version of The Old Man and the Sea (1958).
46. Hemingway suffered from severe depression during his life, and he called his attacks of depression his “black dog days.”
47. His favorite meal was a New York strip steak, a baked potato Caesar salad, and a glass of Bordeaux.
48. On July 2, 1961, this was the meal Hemingway consumed before he took his favorite shotgun and ended his life.
49. Tennessee Williams worked as a caretaker on a chicken ranch.
50. Lewis Carroll once stayed up all night creating the anagram of British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone: ‘Wild agitator, means well.’ Which probably won’t surprise you if you’ve ever read the super trippy Alice in Wonderland.
51. Carroll also had a very bad stammer but was vocally fluent when he spoke with children.
52. Our favorite romantic hipster poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was the literary world’s first celebrity vegan. He even wrote his own pamphlets promoting the benefits of what was at the time considered a radical, predominantly bourgeoisie diet.
53. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer author Mark Twain nearly drowned 9 times as a child, before learning how to swim.
54. Thank goodness he survived, however, since he was the brains behind an early version of the bra strap.
55. Prior to his career as a successful author, Salman Rushdie wrote a copy for the famous advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather, where he was nicknamed ‘Salmon Fishcake.’ He penned a number of successful campaigns including UK Milk Board’s Fresh Cream Cake tagline, ‘Naughty but Nice’, and ‘Irresistibubble’ for Aero Chocolate.
56. Agatha Christie ate apples in the bath for creative inspiration.
57. She tried her best to take up smoking and was really upset when she couldn’t develop the habit.
58. Christie disappeared for 11 days in 1926 and a rumor circulated that she may have been abducted by aliens. She is now believed to have suffered out-of-body amnesia brought on by stress.
59. Daniel Defoe wrote two sequels to Robinson Crusoe: The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe and Serious Reflections During the Life & Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe: With His Vision of the Angelic World.
60. J. R. R. Tolkien went to parties dressed as a polar bear, liked to chase his neighbor down the street dressed as an Anglo-Saxon warrior, and was known for sometimes offering shopkeepers his false teeth as payment.
61. Lolita author Vladimir Nabokov wrote his novels on index cards.
62. Poe often wrote with his Siamese cat on his shoulder.
63. He rarely left his house without a brace of pistols and his dog, a Great Dane called Bounce.
64. Famous author, James Joyce’s last words were reported, ‘Does nobody understand?’ .
65. John Steinbeck’s dog ate his first manuscript of Of Mice and Men.
66. Enid Blyton hated children. The famous children’s author was described by her own daughter as having ‘not a trace of maternal instinct.’
67. Roald Dahl was a taste-tester for Cadbury’s chocolate.
68. This inspired his famous creation, Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.
69. Dahl was buried with some strange objects. Specifically: chocolate, red wine, HB pencils, a power saw, and his pool cues.
70. Truman Capote was majorly superstitious, so he never started or finished a piece of writing on a Friday. And if the number of his hotel room was 13, he’d insist on moving to a different one.
71. Nathaniel Hawthorne helped found a transcendental commune in Boston.
72. He eventually left as the required manual labor left blisters on his hands, making it difficult for him to write.
73. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believed in fairies.
74. He spent $1 million promoting the Cottingley Fairy photos and wrote the book The Coming of the Fairies in 1921 on their authenticity.
75. According to Google Analytics, Alexander Pope has the most popular poetic quote of all time: “To err is human; to forgive, divine.”
76. Walt Whitman didn’t believe Shakespeare was the real writer behind his plays.
77. Bram Stoker claimed his literary pal, Walt Whitman, was the inspiration for his undead villain, ‘Count Dracula.’
78. Washington Irving, the author of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle (the man who went to sleep for 20 years), was an insomniac.
79. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings author Maya Angelou had her own line of Hallmark greeting cards.
80. Angelou was also San Francisco’s first-ever black streetcar conductor.
81. Before her gig as a driver, she also worked as a professional dancer in a variety of clubs during her youth.
82. Famed orator and political theorist Edmund Burke had difficulties with public speaking. In fact, Burke’s public speeches at the House of Commons were so boring that many MPs left the building once he stood up.
83. Hans Christian Andersen brought an emergency coil of rope to hotels in case of a fire.
84. French novelist Victor Hugo, famous for Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, wrote in the nude when suffering from writer’s block.
85. More specifically he’d often ask his servants to remove his clothes and return them only when he’d finished writing for the day.
86. His father was a Napoleonic general.
87. His parents separated when he was sixteen.
88. For his book of poetry verses, Hugo was granted multiple gifts and a 3000 franc pension from King Louis XVIII.
89. In 1822, Hugo married his childhood sweetheart, Adele Foucher.
90. Les Misérables is considered one of the longest books in the history of books.
91. The entire population of France celebrated his eightieth birthday.
92. When he approached his deathbed, he asked for a pauper’s funeral.
93. When Hugo died, his coffin was laid under the Arc de Triomphe for an all-night vigil.
94. The funeral procession took six hours to pass.
95. He reportedly bedded hundreds of women in his lifetime.
96. He even ‘courted’ a 22-year-old at the ripe old age of 70.
97. Robert Louis Stevenson had wooden teeth.
98. Dr. Seuss aka Theodore Geisel wasn’t actually a doctor. He also invented the term ‘nerd.’
99. English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the terms selfless, psychosomatic, bipolar and bisexual, as well as the phrase, suspension of disbelief.
100. Some of Shakespeare’s plays have been translated into Klingon, a language used by a fictional extraterrestrial humanoid warrior species.