6 Writers Who Accidentally Crapped Out Masterpieces
So what does it feel like to write something that will inspire audiences for generations? Apparently it feels like another day at the office, as it turns out some of the greatest works of all time weren't intended to be classics... and often were just dashed off for the hell of it.
#6.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
It changed a generation. It was supposed to be a report on a motorcycle race.
The Impact:
When Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas stumbled into the American literary scene in 1972 it was almost immediately embraced as a new classic, and has been screaming incoherently at the other classics and eating all the shrimp at their parties ever since.
It is the tale of two barely fictionalized versions of Thompson and prominent civil rights attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta (you can see him here in a yellow fishnet t-shirt) who leave a swath of destruction and crumpled plastic baggies across the desert. It's a manic and increasingly frustrated search for the American Dream in a world where Richard Nixon is President; JFK, MLK and Jimi Hendrix are dead and this is considered an appropriate way to dress:
Really? 'Slack Power' is a better slogan than 'Once You Go Slack'? Really?
Some of you may be more familiar with Terry Gilliam's film version of the novel, the poster of which is immediately recognizable to anyone who has ever spent more than five minutes inside a college bookstore.
But it All Got Started When...
Appropriately enough, the entirety of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas came to be because Thompson was on assignment from Rolling Stone to report on some retarded dirt bike race in the middle of the crappy desert.
Thompson spent so much of his time summing up the post-hippie zeitgeist that folks tend to forget that he got his start as a sports writer, and remained one up until his death (his suicide note was famously titled Football Season is Over.")
Over for YOU, anyway!
Thompson, never one for deadlines, responsibilities or coherence, started sending his bosses pages ripped out of his personal journal. Go ahead, try that at your job, see how it goes. Especially if your journal includes paragraphs like this:
"The sporting editors had also given me $300 in cash, most of which was already spent on extremely dangerous drugs. The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, 75 pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a saltshaker half-full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers . . . and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls."
But, if you're Hunter S. Thompson, your editor sends it off for immediate publication and you become the voice of your generation.
The lesson? Contrary to what your parents told you, drugs and motorcycle racing go together beautifully.
#5.
Alice in Wonderland
One of the most beloved tales of all time was something a guy made up off the top of his head to please his 10-year-old girlfriend.
The Impact:
Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland is a classic kid's story about a little girl that finds herself transported into a magical alternate universe that reflects and lampoons our own; including humorous explorations into the subjects of mathematics, statistics, logic and linguistics. Sort of like a Victorian xkcd, but with worse art.
GET THAT FUCKING THING AWAY FROM ME
It's been translated into 125 languages and has been adapted to film dozens of times since the inception of book-adapting technology. There are several silent versions, a Disney version, an anime version, a musical version, an upcoming CGI version and of course a version with some hardcore fucking. It's also responsible for most of the songs written in the 60s, the better parts of The Matrix, a pretty scary-looking video game and even a graphic novel by literary genius Alan Moore, which of course features plenty of hardcore fucking.
It even has an extremely appropriately named medical condition named after it.
But it All Got Started When...
Author Lewis Carroll suffered from a condition that modern biographers have diagnosed as "being a fucking dork." He was home schooled until adolescence, tall and awkward, spoke with a stutter, never married and counted mathematics and logic among his hobbies. But probably his biggest flaw was that he liked to take naked pictures of little girls.
We wonder if the guy doing this portrait ever said "Try not to look so fucking creepy" at any point.
OK, now to be fair, Victorian England was a place and time where pictures of nude children were actually considered pretty cool (apparently, it wasn't terribly uncommon for parents to send out photos of their kids' wieners with the holiday newsletter), and many Carroll scholars believe that his attraction to little girls was purely aesthetic, and free of any sort of eroticism. We will refrain from making any sort of judgment on the matter, but considering Carroll specifically requested that the parents not be present during his naked photo sessions you can imagine how this excuse would hold up when Dateline comes knocking down your door.
"Why don't you just have a seat over there... "
The point is that Carroll wrote Alice in Wonderland at the behest of one of his favorite ladies, 10-year-old Alice Liddell, who was bored out of her mind on some sort of riverboat trip she was taking with her two sisters and Carroll (who was friends with her dad). She asked him to tell her a story, and he did, making it up verbally, on the fly. It was only at her request that he later wrote it down on paper.
This is entirely unlike luring children into your van with promises of candy in the sense that it was somehow socially acceptable and that Carroll actually made good on his promise (sorry to stereotype, but most of the pedophiles we're friends with are extremely unreliable). Oh and Carroll's bait ended up being one of the most beloved works of children's literature of all time. Go figure.
#4.
A Clockwork Orange
A classic novel that inspired a classic film. A novel that was written in three weeks, for quick cash.
The Impact:
Although fairly tame by today's standards, when it was it was published in 1962, A Clockwork Orange would have made the hairs on your grandma's back stand up. The novel features a sadistic, drug-addled, amoral young Beethoven fan who roams the streets of London with his gang, robbing, beating, raping and killing anyone unlucky enough to cross his path. He's the hero of the story.
The book was poorly received by critics and public alike, but this general distaste erupted into a category five shit-storm of public outrage when the Kubrick film of the same name was released in 1971 (somehow, beating a woman to death with a giant sculptural penis doesn't pack the same punch on paper as it does on celluloid). The film was blamed for a rash of copycat crimes, eventually leading to the prohibition of its public display in Great Britain, a ban that was only lifted just over 10 years ago.
Despite the public backlash, the film and book have been heaped with awards and both achieved cult status. They're also hugely popular amongst angsty teenagers who identify with Alex's cruel, nihilistic outlook on life, as evidenced by the wide variety of Clockwork Orange avatars that can found on any number of forums throughout the Internet.
But it all Got Started When...
So who was the tortured, violent, kitten-stomping soul that could find enough darkness within himself to release a horror like A Clockwork Orange upon the unsuspecting populace?
This guy:
That's Anthony Burgess, poet, playwright, critic, author, classical musician, linguist and the only man to win the Pan-European Comb-Over Tournament three years running. He may look like a stodgy old academic, but that's only because he was. His considerable literary output includes a few linguistic studies, a biography of D.H. Lawrence, a couple of children's books, a screenplay about the life of Jesus Christ, a translation of Oedipus Rex and a couple of books that attempt to recreate classical music pieces in prose form (lol whut?).
A Clockwork Orange wasn't written to shock the old folks or subvert the young, but rather as an investigation into the nature of evil and free will, inspired by his own wife's assault by a group of AWOL American G.I.s (USA! USA! USA!). The book is heavily influenced by his own Catholic upbringing, which he maintained philosophical, if not dogmatic ties to. Christian protest groups and 16-year-old Internet atheists have, of course, rejected and embraced the book, respectively.
But Burgess himself considered it one of his weakest works, writing that it was, "... knocked off for money in three weeks, it became known as the raw material for a film which seemed to glorify sex and violence. The film made it easy for readers of the book to misunderstand what it was about, and the misunderstanding will pursue me till I die."
Sure enough, a good chunk of the man's life was spent sighing heavily whenever A Clockwork Orange was brought up during interviews. And it was no doubt brought up during every single fucking one.
Mervyn Peake belongs in here somewhere. I love it that at least one comment poster here uses "Ghormenghast" as a screen name.
Replypeople do mostly miss the moral outcome of Clockwork Orange, in the burgess novel the final chapter involves Alex growing up a little, putting aside his ways in favor of living an honest and decent life. People get too caught up in the more lurid aspects of the tale (although the movie is still fantastic, malcom mcdowell couldn't be more perfect)
ReplyI totally agree with you. I think it ranks up there with Orwell's work as moral literature.
The reason Shakespeare never published any of his plays is because nobody did back then. Publishing was a complete afterthought at the time, partially because the idea of a playwright owning his plays was almost entirely foreign. Acting troupes were basically free to do whatever they wanted with a play once they'd purchased it.
ReplyShakespeare was only the second person to have his plays published in folio form in the history of ever. Also, there were several quarto copies of a few of his plays published in his lifetime. Something that only gets done if you just so happen to fart genius.
The funny thing is, scholars believe that Lord Byron and Percy and Mary Shelley actually WERE having three-way bonefests during this time.
ReplyThe writer missed the boat by not including William Burrough's Naked Lunch on the list. No book seems to affect me the way this one does, it always goes from one end of the spectrum to the other. At times I feel I'm reading cobbled-together crap, (which it arguably is) at others it seems to be pure brilliance, but I always feel like I've dropped a hit of acid when I read it. It is the drug novel that Hunter S. Thompson was trying to write, and wayyy better.
ReplyUmmm....HST = adamantly pro-drugs. Burroughs = adamantly anti-drugs (at least in real life, as he says in the prologue). How is Naked Lunch the novel HST was trying to write? (Not trying to be a dick,..I'm genuinely curious about your theory.)
hunter s. thompson is to good a writer to be on this list, three of his books have been turned into movies, where the buffalo roam which is made up of two of his books the great shark hunt and fear and loathing on the campaign trail , fear and loathing in las vegas and the rum diary. he also wrote for the rolling stone and sports illustrated. and started his own style of writing called gonzo journalism. as stated above he is consider a voice of his generation, and not mentioned is he's considered one of the best writers of his generation.that doesn't sound like somebody who accidentally crapped out a master piece.
Replytoo good a writer to be included with Shakespeare?
But that's the thing; he was a truly epic writer and it seemed like he was putting in 10% effort and 90% phoning it in! He and Shelly define this idea of an auther creating timeless masterpieces while not even really trying.
I don't really know why, but your description of Frankenstein's monster as a "bumbling green retard" made me laugh really hard.
ReplyPutting "humorous" and "xkcd" in the same sentence has to break some kind of grammar laws. He used to be funny but he's running on pure fanboy momentum at this point. It's almost sad because you can still see hints of the guy that wrote the "I can't go to bed, someone is /wrong/ on the internet" in there. Randall Munroe could write a book on how to take a decent premise for a joke and f**k it up.
ReplyDo you care to share with the rest of us the link to your own, undoubtedly hysterical yet deeply philosophical, comic site?
Oh, what's that? You don't have one?
IF YOU ARE GOING TO CRITICIZE SOMEONE ELSE'S WORK, YOU DAMN WELL BETTER BE ABLE TO DO IT BETTER THAN THEY CAN
I'm sure a lot of people have pointed it out but it was Kubrick himself who banned the film from being shown
ReplyThe list forget Dan Brown and "Da Vinci Code"... also known as, how to take a bunch of irrelevant crap based on a book (Holy Blood Holy Grail) which was in turn based on a long tissue of lies cooked up by a mad Frenchman (Pierre Plantard), flogging it as "fiction but 99% true", and then selling 40 million copies.
ReplyThis list is about 'masterpieces', though. Not s**t that's inexplicably popular despite failing even as a simple mystery novel.
Actually, s**t that's inexplicably popular despite failing is the majority of this list. Thus explaining why it was crapped out.
This list is great! but you also should have added Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Stevenson
ReplyHow is deliberately not getting your work published crapping out a masterpiece? I was hoping for some real dirt on the muthafucka
ReplyAnthony Burgess looks like Boris Johnson in twenty years.
ReplyThat would be a '5 year BIT in jail, not bid.' Jeeze, kids these days.
ReplyKinda depends on if you're saying it in Chino or Walpole.
Dickens apparently wrote A Christmas Carol for some quick cash.
Reply"assault by a group of AWOL American G.I.s (USA! USA! USA!)"
Reply Hide All See All 3 Repliesbabby first anti american babbling
Shut up faggot
I'm sure the GI's in question would have said she asked for it.
it's her fault for having a vagina...
Lord Byron didn't create "the Vampyre" along with Mary Shelly on that summer. It was John Polidori's work, who in turn use Lord Byron as his inspiration. Some early publications erroneously printed the work as Lord Byron's.
ReplyYou are correct, but Byron created 'A Fragment of a Novel' at the Villa Diodati, which is an unfinished vampire story, which inspired Polidori to write 'The Vampyre'. In that case, you may notice that the article references 'A Fragment' and not 'The Vampyre', although the latter is often regarded as the one which started the vampire craze.
Hmm, indeed.
As Caliban said, "You taught me your language; and after reading this list my profit on it is that I know how to say meh." Gee, going out on a limb there with Thompson, Crack Writers. Since we're on the subject of hacks, why not mention William S. "bore us to death with free prose" Burroughs and Charles "did I mention I love fu*king and getting drunk?" Bukowski as lovely examples of uno-hit wonders? Possibly because it would first require of them to actually have written "masterpieces" for them to then crap all over (unless you're the kind of peoples who think Cities of the Red Night is a work of staggering genius, and if that is you in that case, then fu*k you, you sad, sad virgins -- "transgressional" my Uber Alles ass, co*ksuckers)
ReplyLets play the "change the words around and see what happens" game.
Reply"beating a woman to death with a giant sculptural penis"
turns into:
"Woman with a sculptural giant, beating a penis to death"
Heheheh. My work here is done.
The Kafka book that ends mid-sentence is The Castle.
Reply