Secret Lives of Great Authors

Secret Lives of Great Authors contains irreverent and fun-filled bios of all the writers you were forced to read in high school, from Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson to J. D. Salinger and Sylvia Plath. And guess what? These folks were more interesting than your teachers ever let on.

Consider:

• Louisa May Alcott was addicted to opium.
• Franz Kafka chewed his food 45 times before swallowing.
• W. B. Yeats paid surgeons to transplant monkey glands into his scrotum.
• J. R. R. Tolkien slept in his bathroom.
• Ayn Rand was a fan of Charlie's Angels.
• J. D. Salinger drank his own urine (or so says his daughter Margaret).
• Kurt Vonnegut managed a Saab dealership before hitting the big time.
• Edgar Allan Poe was kicked out of West Point Military Academy.
• As a boy, Ernest Hemingway was dressed in girl's clothes by his mother-in fact, she often introduced him as "my daughter."

Here are all the authors you see on the walls of the cafe at your local bookstore, complete with fun trivia and hilariously goofy portraits, just like the other books in the popular Secret Lives series. Don't miss this rollicking tour through the highs and lows of great literature.