Truman Capote — A.K.A. Truman Streckfus Persons

Truman Streckfus Persons was Truman Capote’s real name.

The title Finnegans Wake contains no apostrophe in the word Finnegans. Thus Finnegans is a plural and Wake is a verb.

Issac Newtons’s father was illiterate.

Walt Whitman’s mother was illiterate.

Roald Dahl was an anti-semite.

Djuna Barnes had no formal education at all.

Edmund Wilson once proposed marriage to Djuna Barnes. Who declined.

Djuna: self-taught and semi-talented but, alas, anti-semitic.

Dostoevsky’s father was the resident physician at a hospital for the poor, but he treated his own serfs so abominably that they murdered him.

John Paul Sartre and Albert Schweitzer were cousins.

Christina Rossetti died a virgin.

“Keat’s piss-a-bed poetry,” Lord Byron called it.

H.G. Wells was an anti-semite.

Voltaire was illegitimate.

Evelyn Waugh was found dead on the bathroom floor.

Djuna Barnes was an anti-semite.

Three of Wittgenstein’s brothers committed suicide.

Tolstoy ranked Guy de Maupassant as second only to Victor Hugo as the greatest European writer of his day.

As an editor, T.S. Eliot rejected Animal Farm.

The poet Lionel Johnson: tough way to go — but upon second thought …

Lionel Johnson died after falling off a barstool.

Tennyson was reading Cymbeline when he died. (His copy of the play was put into his coffin.)

Stephen Crane was the catcher on his Syracuse University baseball team.

Chekov was an anti-semite.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was bullied as child.

As was Percy Shelley. Who once went after his bullies with a pitchfork.

Ernest Hemingway was an anti-semite.

Mohammed was an anti-semite.

Immanuel Kant was an anti-semite.

W.B. Yeats was an anti-semite.

Being a successful reader of poetry on stage is not necessarily the same thing as being a writer of successful poetry. Said Anna Akhmatova.

Whose book of poems Requiem she memorized and did not write down for fear of the Russian Communist regime that would destroy her work.

“That man writes really too sloppily,” said James Joyce of D.H. Lawrence.

When Joseph Conrad was twenty-years-old, he tried to commit suicide over his gambling losses. In later life, he let people believe the bullet wound had come from a duel.

“I differ from Joseph Conradically,” said Vladimir Nabokov, who did not particularly like being compared to fellow Russian and ex-patriot writer Joseph Conrad.

Zeno, famous for his paradoxes, hanged himself after breaking his toe. At age ninety.

Hey, Zeno, can I call you a toe truck?