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.
Dickens apparently wrote A Christmas Carol for some quick cash.
Reply
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"assault by a group of AWOL American G.I.s (USA! USA! USA!)"
Replybabby first anti american babbling
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.
ReplyAs 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.
ReplyIt's perhaps worth pointing out here that Anthony Burgess wrote his most famous novel in 3 weeks because he was mistakenly told by his doctor that he had a terrible disease and would very soon be dead, and he wanted to leave a legacy to support his family. It's hardly surprising that the content is kind of dark!
ReplyHunter S. Thompson is a bit of a grey area, since he's one of the most unreliable narrators who ever lived. Nothing he wrote about himself, including accounts of how he wrote his books, is necessarily true. It's even been suggested that he didn't really consume anything like the amount of drugs and booze that he claims because it would have killed him.
As for Lewis Carroll, if you've actually seen any of the surviving photos he took of extremely young girls with no clothes on (links not provided because these pictures are probably borderline illegal), it's hard to escape the conclusion that the reason he never married was that he never fancied anyone old enough for him to legally marry.
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was actually the daughter of an early feminist, Mary Wollstonecraft, who criticized the philosophes of the Enlightenment for their treatment of women, and William Godwin, and early anarchist philosopher. So she came from a background of writing and criticism of accepted norms, both of which would have been helpful in the writing of Frankenstein.
ReplyWhat I love most about the f'ing Internet is that you can't even read an article on Straight Dope about Lewis Carroll without some smug jackass making a Republican joke, and "the world's smartest man" lamely running with it for a paragraph before getting to the point of his story.
ReplyTo be fair, the article was written back in 1995, the better part of 17 years ago. It most likely was originally published in print, back when such was the way the majority of us got our information. The existence of those comments has absolutely nothing to do with the Internet.
Thompson probably didn't turn in "Fear and Loathing" expecting it to be a masterpiece, but he was such an outstanding writer that even his half-assed work could turn out to be a piece of American history
ReplyI rarely comment on here, but based on my love of literature and how poorly this article was researched.... First, when you wrote "The Tower" I thought there was something by Kafka newly discovered that I haven't read, turns out you pulled it out of nowhere. In the case of Anthony Burgess he wrote a number of very good novels you failed to mention in your writing; I guess in order to support the theory Burgess crapped out a singular masterpiece. I would agree with Burgess that M/F, The Wanting Seed, Tremor of Intent,and a number of others were in many ways better works of his. Again in the case of Thompson, although I am not a fan of his work; he wrote a number of similar pieces throughout his career and I doubt his bosses at the Rolling Stone were surprised by his writing in a tenor he was known for. In the case of Shakespeare a number of pop authors today are still great writers, irregardless of their language usage etc. This seems to have been written slap dash by someone who knows very little about the authors described. Particularly in the case of Thompson, Kafka, and Burgess.
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesI can't figure out if your use of the non-word "irregardless" is a clever reference to the article (Shakespeare!) or if you're just a moron. I'm going with moron. Cheers!
Yet nobody disputes a single point I made, oh internet you do me proud.
Yet nobody disputes a single point I made; oh internet you fail again.
Yet nobody disputes... Oh wait you already said that twice.
dont forget in anime there is a even better series for alice in wonderland called alice in the country of hearts which is a really good manga, and a kuroshitsuji cross over called ciel in wonderland where all the kuroshitsuji characters like sebastian play wonderland characters
ReplyI'm surprised the bible isn't on here. Don't get me wrong, it's s**t, but like a bronze plated shit.
ReplyNote: The title of this article is not "At least 46 writers who accidentally etc."
It's such a shame that Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) liked little girls. He was so very, very handsome and seemed like such a cutie. Damn.
ReplyThis is the last goddamn time I’m going to explain this to somebody so f*****g pay attention if you please. *ahem* HE DIDN’T LIKE LITTLE GIRLS YOU f*****g MORON!! Alice Liddell just happened to be the daughter of Carrol's boss, you know the dean of the college he worked at? So of course he is going to be nice to his friend/bosses daughter. On top of which in Victorian society children especially little girls where considered the last bastion of innocents left and where to be cherished and adored . Its only in our society do we think of sexual relations with a pre-pubescent child.
William Faulkner has written some things he calls terrible, but are classic.
ReplyI agree with Faulkner.
"It would seem as if Shakespeare was only in it for the money...And the bitches." Funniest thing I've read today.
ReplyNo one in Shakespeare's time published their plays lol. Even the actors who performed them were often given only their own lines and some cue lines so they'd know when to speak. It was after he died that a group of people put together his works in the first folio. It was the first time a chunk of plays had been officially contributed to a specific author, and the beginning of authorship as an actual thing (plays were previously credited to the theater company that first performed them).
ReplyRight on, dude bro! That's fo shizzle how Aristophanes, Euripedes, and all those other Greek dudes did it. Ooops. Guess that was kind of a burn.
"fairly tame by today's standards"
ReplyNo Sir, violent gang raping scenes, portrayed as everyday fun game are by no means tame.
You clearly havnt read the book.
On the back of my copy of Frankenstein it says that she came up with the idea in a dream??
ReplyNo, you're looking at your copy of Twilight.
She did, Mary Shelley had a nightmare about a creature rising from the dead when she was there and wrote the story. Might've been all that opium the fellas were on, I dunno. CZeke I dunno about Twilight, but I hope that it wasn't a rational conscious mind that spewed that drivel.