Secret Lives of Great Authors: What Your Teachers Never Told You about Famous Novelists, Poets, and Playwrights

It appears (at least from this book) that the majority of famous authors were either alcoholics, drug addicts or hypochondriacs, or sometimes all three! Reading this is somewhat akin to going through a supermarket tabloid where "inquiring minds want to know". Lest you think I'm dissing the book, please believe me when I say that I enjoyed it very much (perhaps I'm a literary voyeur!). If you want to know more, much more, than you need to know about many famous authors, read this book.

... I found one serious flaw that bugged me (and made me question the resources the author used). The author stated that Mark Twain made a speech on breaking wind to an audience that included Queen Elizabeth I. The year of birth given for Mark Twain is 1835. Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603. Queen Elizabeth II was born in 1926, and the author dates Mark Twain's death as 1910, and therefore there is no typo here. He must have meant Queen Victoria. For this, I have deducted a star, but nevertheless, I found this book to extremely entertaining. I definitely recommend this book for a good laugh, if nothing else.

Face punching, pill popping, cross dressing, urine drinking--this book has all that and more. I had no idea one of my favorite authors had a penchant for drinking urine, or that Papa H. wore frilly draws as a kid. Author Bob Schnakenberg is as funny as ever. Secret Lives of Great Authors manages to entertain and inform at the same time. Plus there's even a shout out to me on the copyright page. --Juré Fiorillo, co-author, True Stories of Law & Order: SVU

It's folks like Bob Schnakenberg that make me "proud" to be a resident of this God-forsaken burg. Bob Schnakenberg, and once-upon-a-time Hubert Selby, Jr. But Hubert moved on to L. A. Bob's still with us here in Brooklyn. I'd like him to make a million, but I don't want to lose him to Manhattan -- which is where all "successful" writers seem to end up (pace Paul Auster). This book rips. It rips with humor and Schadenfreude (never a dull sentiment). It also rips APART -- viz., the real-life reputations of many of our guiding literary lights (never "lites"). I wondered at one point whether Bob had pulled his punches a bit with Richard Wright...but I then moved right on to Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and a few others and forgot all about whether Bob had or hadn't sacked Write adequately. This book is worth every buck you can scrounge up to buy it. Do yourself a favor: go without a Starbucks for a night or two and splurge. Russell

Louisa May Alcott was addicted to opium! Ayn Rand was a Charlie's Angels fan! J. D. Salinger drank his own urine! J. R. R. Tolkien slept in his bathroom! Kafka chewed his food 45 times before swallowing! Yeats paid surgeons to transplant monkey glands in his scrotum! Robert Schnakenberg's quirky little tome certainly lives up to its subtitle: What Your Teachers Never Told You about Famous Novelists, Poets and Playwrights. What a hoot! What a holler! Just when you thought it was safe to pick up The Old Man and the Sea (again), you find out that as a boy, Hemingway's mother dressed him in girl's clothes---and often introduced him as "my daughter." There's lots o' fun stuff here . . . and it's never a drag.