Writers Gone Wild: The Feuds, Frolics, and Follies of Literature's Great Adventurers, Drunkards, Lovers, Iconoclasts, and Misanthropes [Bargain Price] [Paperback]

Bill Peschel (Author)

Book Description

Release date: November 2, 2010

Truth is stranger than fiction.

If you've imagined famous writers to be desk-bound drudges, think again. Writers Gone Wild rips back the (book) covers and reveals the seamy underside of the writing life.

Insightful, intriguing, and irresistibly addictive, Writers Gone Wild reveals such fascinating stories as:

* The night Dashiell Hammett hired a Chinese prostitute to break up S. J. Perelman's marriage (and ran off with his wife).

* Why Sylvia Plath bit Ted Hughes on the cheek.

* Why Ernest Hemingway fought a book critic, a modernist poet, and his war correspondent/wife Martha Gellhorn (but not at the same time).

* The near-fatal trip Katherine Anne Porter took while high on marijuana in Mexico.

* Why women's breasts sent Percy Bysshe Shelley screaming from the room.

* The day Virginia Woolf snuck onto a Royal Navy ship disguised as an Abyssinian prince.

Pull up a chair, turn on good reading light, and discover what your favorite writers were up to while away from their desks. Sometimes, they make the wildest characters of all.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Bill Peschel is a lifelong reader whose five thousand-book library keeps his home in Hershey, Pennsylvania, firmly anchored to the earth. When not collecting weird and wild stories, he edits news articles and designs pages at the Harrisburg Patriot-News.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Perigee Trade; Original edition (November 2, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0399536183
• ASIN: B004Z8LNZY
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,245,146 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

A chance encounter with a biography of George Bernard Shaw inspired Bill to start collecting stories about writers at their best and worst. The result, "Writers Gone Wild," collects 200 stories and anecdotes and earned praise from Bookgasm and reviewer Caroline Leavitt.

Bill followed that up with "The Complete, Annotated Whose Body?" with Dorothy L. Sayers, "The Complete, Annotated Mysterious Affair at Styles" with Agatha Christie, and is working on "The Complete, Annotated Secret Adversary."

Bill Peschel was a newspaper reporter, editor and page designer who won a Pulitzer Prize with The Patriot-News, and his book reviews have appeared in newspapers across the country. He lives with his family in Hershey, Penn., where the air sometimes really does smell like chocolate.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly Recommended November 13, 2010

By Deb Salisbury

Format:Paperback

Writers Gone Wild is a brilliant collection of short anecdotes about writers and their odder moments. Funny, astonishing, and occasionally sad, this book lays bare parts of many famous writers' lives. Highly recommended, especially if you only have brief moments to read at one time.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars A very entertaining book September 23, 2012

By Kurt A. Johnson

Format:Paperback

Think you know all about George Bernard Shaw, James Boswell and William Faulkner? Well think again! In this interesting little book, author Bill Peschel presents the literary glitterati in all of the unvarnished reality. There are strange, but all too true, accounts of strange goings-on, some of which will amuse you, and some shock you.

Overall, I found this to be a pretty darn good book. As you might expect with a book like this, you will no doubt have heard some of these stories before, but the author spreads such a wide net that you are sure to find stories that will tickle your fancy. It's a very entertaining book, and I think that you will enjoy it as much as I did.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "Great fun to read" August 7, 2012

By arielkprice

Format:Paperback

Writers Gone Wild reveals all of the dirty secrets of the authors we know and love so well. As author Bill Peschel blatantly admits, it's gossip. These stories do give us more complete views of the lives from which some of our best-loved literature arose. But let's be honest. "They're great fun to read."
I'll just give you a taste of the mishaps our authors got into:

When Voltaire was beaten, his friend just said, "You are a poet and you have been beaten. This is the order of things." Ain't that the truth.
Stuart Little was banned from the New York Public Library for "interspecies miscegenation." Upton Sinclair published an obituary for one of his characters to gain public attention. See, even back then authors had to market themselves. William Faulkner worked at the post office and would go through people's mail, throwing away what he thought they didn't need and keeping the magazines for himself. Virginia Woolf dressed up as an Abyssinian prince and fooled the British Royal Navy.

Honestly, most of these stories will make you laugh. Some are disgusting. I have a lot less respect for Ernest Hemingway and a few others. Some authors are examples of how very thin the line can be between genius and madness. I felt sorry for these and several authors, whose talent went unnoticed or ignored, or whose great writing arose from great personal struggle.

I really enjoyed this collection because it does give us a more realistic picture of some of these authors. In a way, it's nice to know that they had to deal with life just as we do. Some caved under the pressure, but others channeled their experiences into their work.

5.0 out of 5 stars Delightful, well-written, and well-edited. This is a fun read February 22, 2013

By Bonnie Britt

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Bill Peschel has tapped into the craft he learned as a journalist to produce short pieces on the most familiar literary names of our time and in history. Well beyond mentioning what each of them produced that made them famous, Peschel gives us the nuggets that tell us something about the character of each of these writers. He's grouped these deliciously gossipy stories into topical areas shown in the table of contents. Some of these topics include dramatic debuts, public embarrassments, frauds and hoaxes, crime and punishment, war, bad craziness, alcohol and drugs, and the joy of sex.

Writers Gone Wild: The Feuds, Frolics, and Follies of Literature's Great Adventurers, Drunkards, Lovers, Iconoclasts, and Misanthropes by Bill Peschel is both thoughtful and thoroughly entertaining. I can pick it up, read a few pages, and set it down, pick it up a few hours later, read a few more pages, and never miss a beat.

5.0 out of 5 stars The Write Stuff June 24, 2011

By Noel TOP 1000 REVIEWER

Format:Paperback

Malcolm Lowry's mysterious death. Boswell's lasciviousness. Simone de Beauvoir's relationship with Nelson Algren. Hemingway's pettiness. Fitzgerald's drunkenness. Joyce and Proust's only meeting. Jack London's secret to writing. Edith Wharton's snobbishness. Rimbaud's fiction and gun running. Mishima's dramatic death. HG Wells' numerous affairs. Plath's spicy seductress.

As you can tell from the list above, this is a book full of anecdotes about the greats of literature. Each anecdote is a page or so and any literate reader is likely to spot a number of writers they've read and/or admired and is likely to come away with a completely different idea of who they were.

I'm a literature student and found this book to be a very entertaining read with lots of funny/interesting/sad/bizarre stories about some of my favourite writers. It humanises these men and women who, I think, have become beatified rather than remembered as flawed human beings who created art. The book reminds us that they were just like us.

Great fun to read and especially good if you're familiar with the names and their books.

5.0 out of 5 stars A fun read February 2, 2011

By Barb

Format:Paperback

A pleasant, readable style and interesting annecdotes make Writers Gone Wild a fun read. There are a wide variety of writers mentioned and the stories range from comic to bizarre. The short annecdotes in each themed chapter make it easy to either read at length or to pick up and put down. Perfect for someone who wants to read about the information that is never covered in history classes.

5 of 8 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Full of half truths! July 23, 2011

By sundowner2

Format:Paperback

When I started to read this book, I was hoping for some of the "Feuds, Frolics and Follies" the author promised in the description. What I found instead was that the book was full of half truths laid out in a way either to make the "cast" the butt of a joke, or else in a condensending, judgmental way. A few examples:

Mary Shelly, how she "was not" invited to Percy Shelly's funeral. Well, that's because women wern't allowed to attend funeral at that time. Elizabeth Riddel, having died of laudnum poisoning? Yes, she did, but she committed sucicide because her husband had had such a long string of lovers, had failed repeatedly upon his promises to finish paintings and help provide income (for which she was almost entirely responsible for providing). Oscar Wilde, visiting a brotel, then coming out and saying it was like cold mutton, and was the first, and last time in ten years, the author makes this out as though he's a freak for saying that, and tells the whole story in such a poor light, but neglects to mention that Oscar Wilde had recently been released from hard labor after protecting his lover from a scandal, and it had ruined his health to the point of near death. He was also suffering from the loss of his wife and children, who left him while he was in prison, and had been seperated (for his own good) from the lover who caused his early death. Where is the sympathy for that man? I feel like that was a horrible story to have in the book.

Most of the stories were about drunk writers, or drugged up writers, and as I said, full of half truths and a tone to paint every charachter in a poor light, depending on the author's desire. It's a shame, had I known, I wouldn't have wasted my money on this. too bad I can't take it back.

If you want the truth, read biographies.