"[A] rollicking romp through a gallery of writers whose genius came with a price... Shaffer offers a terrific blend of literary history, biography, and witty commentary." — Publishers Weekly
Literary Rogues: A Scandalous History of Wayward Authors: a wildly funny and shockingly true compendium of the bad boys (and girls) of Western literature.
Buy Now: Amazon • Barnes & Noble • BAM • Google • iTunes • Powells • Indiebound • Chapters Indigo • Kobo
Read an Excerpt: PDF
Trade Paperback / eBook
320 pgs • US/Canada
ISBN13: 9780062077288 • ISBN10: 0062077287
Harper Perennial / HarperCollins
Publication: February 5, 2013
Press Contact at Harper Perennial / Request ARC:
katherine.beitner [at] harpercollins.com • 212-207-7522
Author Photo: Print (BW) • Web (BW) • Print (Color) • Web (Color)
Description:
Rock stars, rappers, and actors haven’t always had a monopoly on misbehaving. There was a time when authors fought with both words and fists, a time when poets were the ones living fast and dying young. This funny, insightful, and wildly entertaining narrative profiles the literary greats who wrote generation-defining classics such as The Great Gatsby and On the Road while living and loving like hedonistic rock icons and who were as likely to go on epic benders as they were to hit the bestseller lists. Literary Rogues turns back the clock to consider these historical (and, in some cases, living) legends, including Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Hunter S. Thompson, and Bret Easton Ellis. Brimming with fascinating research, Literary Rogues is part nostalgia, part literary analysis, and a wholly raucous celebration of brilliant writers and their troubled legacies.
Author Biography:
Andrew Shaffer is the author of Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love and, under the pen name Fanny Merkin, Fifty Shames of Earl Grey. His writing has appeared in such diverse publications as Mental Floss and Maxim. An Iowa native, Shaffer lives in Lexington, Kentucky, a magical land of horses and bourbon.
Praise:
"Looking for literature to trash your hotel room by? Look no further than Literary Rogues, acclaimed humorist Andrew Shaffer’s stranger-than-fiction collection of profiles of the maddest, baddest, most dangerous-to-know writers ever to put pen to paper." — Book-of-the-Month Club
"This book was simultaneously entertaining, informative and heartbreaking." — Book Fidelity
"A quick-read biographical guide to literature's most notorious wastrels, scoundrels and rebels, from the Marquis de Sade to James Frey... Entertaining and well-researched..." — Kirkus
As Seen On:
Authors Include:
The Marquis de Sade, Samuel Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, Lord Byron, Mary and Percy Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, George Sand, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Dylan Thomas, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, Ken Kesey, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, John Cheever, Raymond Carver, Jay McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, Elizabeth Wurtzel, James Frey