Books Trivia | 100 facts & trivia about famous authors (part 5)

A writers life is important, as sometimes can be quite influencing for his or her art.

During part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4 we found out some quite interesting and exciting facts about famous authors. And right now we are about to learn even more about them!

1. She thought up her first poem while walking across a football field on the way home from high school.
2. She wrote a libretto called Oratorio for Sasquatch, Man, and Two Androids.
3. She made a craft beer in honor of her book MaddAddam.
4. Her publisher didn’t publish her first novel, The Edible Woman, for five years.
5. She has a special hat made out of newspaper, cardboard, and plastic bags.
6. She’s named after her mother, Margaret Dorothy.
7. She’s a Harvard dropout.
8. If you can call someone who didn’t complete their doctorate a dropout.
9. She made the cover for her 1983 book Murder in the Dark out of a sunblock ad.
10. She once did the author Sheila Heti’s horoscope in an interview.
11. She also wrote a rock song called “Frankenstein Monster Song.”
12. Her favorite alcoholic beverage is single-malt scotch, straight up.
13. She’s had the same agent since 1971.
14. She once got mugged by two kids with a big knife. She gave them her money, but not her cards.
15. 28. She only started full-time school at eight.
16. 29. While at university, she read her poems in a coffee shop called The Bohemian Embassy, where Lorne Michaels and Gordon Lightfoot also performed.
17. Her roommates at Harvard burned her Hush Puppies shoes.
18. She always begins her writing with a pen or pencil and paper.
19. Her first book signing (for The Edible Woman) was in the Hudson’s Bay store in Edmonton, in the men’s sock and underwear department.
20. She once read aloud a recipe for eating grapefruit.
21. Rupi Kaur is one of the most famous InstPoet.
22. Kaur first made a name for herself online using her website, her Twitter account (where she has more than 100,000 Followers), her Instagram account (where she’s closing in on a million), and her Tumblr.
23. Kaur was born in Punjab, India.
24. She moved to Canada when she was four years old.
25. She can read and speak Punjabi but confesses that she doesn’t have the mastery of that language necessary to write in it.
26. Part of her signature writing style is a complete lack of capital letters, and the use of just one form of punctuation—the period.
27. These are both features of Punjabi, features she’s imported into her English writing as a way of connecting back to the place and culture of her origin.
28. At first, she thought, she wanted to be a visual artist.
29. Rupi Kaur says she only gained a serious passion for poetry in 2013 when she was a 20-year old student.
30. She was suddenly exposed and influenced by great poets like Anais Nin and Virginia Woolf.
31. All of her poems are accompanied by cute doodles.
32. Her religion is Sikh.
33. Sikh religion has influenced her work.
34. Much of the work in Milk and Honey takes direct inspiration from the Sikh scriptures, which Kaur has credited with assisting in her own spiritual and personal development.
35. She has also studied a lot of Sikh history.
36. She put together Milk and Honey as a self-published book and got it to Amazon in November of 2014.
37. In Amazon, it sold nearly 20,000 copies.
38. Rupi Kaur began her poetry career as a spoken word poet.
39. Rupi Kaur gained prominence after her picture ban case from Instagram.
40. In 2015, Insta-poet Rupi Kaur posted a series of fragmented photographs on Instagram representing the honest, bloody reality of menstruation.
41. W.B. Yeats was fascinated by the occult and mysticism.
42. He joined the Golden Dawn, a secret society that practiced ritual magic, in 1890. progressing to its Inner Order in 1893, and remained an active member for most of his life.
43. He also joined the paranormal research organization The Ghost Club in 1911.
44. While W.B. Yeats’ unrequited love for Maud Gonne is as famous as his poetry, what is less well-known is that they consummated the affair in 1908 – almost 20 years after the first meeting. However, the relationship did not develop further.
45. After proposing to, and being rejected by, Maud Gonne for the fifth time, he asked her daughter Iseult to marry him.
46. It was an unsuccessful proposal too.
47. Shortly after Iseult’s refusal, Yeats, then 52, married 25-year-old Georgie Hyde-Lees in October 1917.
48. He may have been in such a rush to get hitched because he believed it was written in the stars, because an astrological chart drawn up through the Golden Dawn found in October 1917 was the ideal time for Yeats to marry.
49. Yeats’ introduction to automatic writing began as a sly attempt by Georgie to alleviate his fears about their marriage.
50. Yeats served in the first Seanad for six years from 1922.
51. He argued against the ban on divorce, a move he viewed as “grossly oppressive” to the Protestant minority.
52. He played a major role in the Irish cultural revival as he was involved in founding the Abbey Theatre and the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, now the Hugh Lane.
53. He also supported the Cuala Press set up by his sisters to produce books of Irish interest.
54. Thomas Mann shared the Nobel Prize primarily because of his breakthrough novel Buddenbrooks, published in 1901
55. In 1891, shortly after he had to leave Clongowes Wood College when his father lost his job, 9-year-old Hames Joyce wrote a poem called “Et Tu Healy?”.
56. It was published by his father John and distributed to friends.
57. The elder Joyce thought so highly of it, he allegedly sent copies to the Pope.
58. As an adult, Joyce would publish his first book, a collection of poems called Chamber Music, in 1907.
59. While attending University College Dublin, Joyce attempted to publish a negative review—titled “The Day of the Rabblement”—of a new local playhouse called the Irish Literary Theatre in the school’s paper, St. Stephen’s.
60. This caused controversy.
61. Nora Barnacle and James Joyce finally married in 1931.
62. By this time they had already lived together for 27 years, traveled the continent, and had two children.
63. They first met in Dublin in 1904 when Joyce struck up a conversation with her near the hotel where Nora worked as a chambermaid.
64. She initially mistook him for a Swedish sailor because of his blue eyes and the yachting cap he wore that day.
65. Their first date was on June 14.
66. If it is still considered a date when the girl doesn’t show up.
67. He always had money problems.
68. But the biggest problems were those medical problems with his eyes!
69. Joyce has worked as a teacher in Berlitz in Pola in Austria-Hungary (now Pula, Croatia).
70. Joyce invested in the Volta Cinematograph, which is considered “the first full-time, continuous, dedicated cinema” in Ireland.
71. He planned the first edition of 1000 copies after a lot of years.
72. 100 of them were about to be signed by the author.
73. It was allowed to be published in the United States in 1933 after the case of United States v. One Book Called Ulysses deemed the book not obscene and allowed it in the United States
74. Ernest Hemingway was a major champion of Ulysses.
75. He met Joyce at Shakespeare and Company and was later a frequent companion among the bars of Paris with writers like Wyndham Lewis and Valery Larbaud.
76. Hemingway recalled James Joyce as he would start to get into drunken fights and leave Hemingway to deal with the consequences.
77. When Joyce met Marcel Proust arrived late, was drunk, and wasn’t wearing formal clothes because he was too poor to afford them.
78. Art reviewer Arthur Power said both writers simply talked about liking truffles.
79. Joyce later told painter Frank Budgen, “Our talk consisted solely of the word ‘No.’”
80. Their meet up occurred at a party for composer Igor Stravinsky and ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev in Paris.
81. Marcel Proust was born in 1871 in an area of the 16th arrondissement in Paris called Auteuil.
82. Marcel Proust is best known for his seven-volume novel, In Search of Lost Time
83. Since its publication, In Search of Lost Time, has awed critics and inspired several authors like Virginia Woolf and Vladimir Nabokov.
84. In Search of Lost Time comes in at a whopping 3,200 (the word count sometimes reaches 4,000, depending on the edition) pages.
85. It contains over 1.2 million words.
86. It’s considered the longest novel ever published.
87. He also wrote the longest sentence ever published
88. In Search of Lost Time, there is a sentence that runs on for 847 words!
89. When Proust sought to publish the first volume of In Search of Lost Time called Swann’s Way, several different publishers in Paris turned him down.
90. The French expression, “La madeleine de Proust” was inspired by Marcel Proust.
91. Vladimir Nabokov was raised trilingual—the family conversed in Russian, English, and French.
92. His father was also named Vladimir.
93. He had a butterfly-collecting hobby.
94. Nabokov was actually a world-renowned expert on butterflies, so much so that in the 1940s he became curator of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology’s butterfly collection.
95. He said about the movie adaptation of his book “Lolita”: “‘My supreme, and in fact, only, interest in these motion picture contracts is money. I don’t give a damn for what they call ‘art.'”
96. He also didn’t really like Freud.
97. Nabokov has been dead since 1977
98. Nabokov specifically requested that his son, Dmitri, destroy the novel’s manuscript.
99. It consists of 125 handwritten index cards as Nabokov always wrote on index cards.
100. He eventually became worried about what would happen to the manuscript after his own death, so last year Dmitri decided to publish the work.