Like all literary nerds, we’re fascinated by the marginalia of our favorite authors, and recently we’ve been totally addicted to examining their handwritten manuscripts and journal entries. Thanks to the our new favorite Tumblr, Fuck yeah, manuscripts!, there are many examples at hand, but after spending a significant time sifting through, we wondered if we were really learning anything. In an attempt to be pop-psychologists, we checked out a 5-minute online handwriting analysis test (meant, obviously, for hiring managers), to see if we could dig up anything on our favorite writers. We found the results to be something like a horoscope — a little bit right for everybody, but probably kind of random. Click through to check out the handwriting of ten famous writers, and see what it might say about them.
“Decidedly, I’m a better landscape gardener than a novelist,” Edith Wharton once declared. Indeed, Wharton, whose birthday we celebrate today, was as much a designer and tastemaker during her life as she was a writer. In fact, her first published book, The Decoration of Houses, was a design manual, and so many of her novels glow with beautiful descriptions of design, atmosphere, and costume that could only have come from a knowledgeable hand.
Wharton built her estate, The Mount, in 1902, and if you ask us, its rolling green gardens certainly do her claim justice. So, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of her birth, we’ve collected fifteen gorgeous authors’ homes and estates — though none, perhaps, are as gorgeous as hers. Click through to check out our list, and let us know if we’ve missed any of your own favorite writers’ homes in the comments.
Man Ray’s most prolific years were during his time in Paris in the 1920s. The artist left New York for France’s bohemian metropolis where the former painter and Dadaist was embraced by the Surrealist community, and his photography career started to take shape. Most of Man Ray’s models were the hipster elite of his social circle — famous friends with impressive careers of their own, many burgeoning legends in the art and literary worlds. He took snaps of everyone from a baby-faced Salvador Dalí, Hemingway, New York collaborator Marcel Duchamp, and model-cum-muse and photographer Lee Miller. The portraits are modern (several look like they were taken just yesterday), bold, humorous, and quintessentially Man Ray. Check out our gallery past the break for a closer look.
Sometimes you love a book — or an author’s body of works — so much that you need an outlet that allows you to express that love. Sure, book club might help a little, but if you’re a truly die-hard fan, you might find that you need a little more tradition (or maybe full-on period costumes) to really inspire you. After all, nothing makes literature come to life like actually incorporating it into the modern-day world, whether by holding nonstop readings, visiting grave sites, or carrying around special tokens of appreciation and winking at other insiders. So if you’ve wondering how best to salute your favorite authors and novels, click through to read up on a few literary traditions ripe for the joining, and let us know if we’ve missed any of your favorites in the comments!
Happy birthday to Gothic lit god Edgar Allan Poe, whose chilling tales have influenced innumerable artists of every kind across the globe and have been a comfort for angsty teens everywhere. While the scribe’s life story is a fascinating one filled with madness and love, we’re celebrating the grim gentleman’s legacy by calling attention to one of his greatest attributes: his debonair mustache. Poe’s appearance has been well documented, citing that he traded long sideburns for his now-famous facial hair, which he first grew around 1845. An article in the 1878 copy of Scribner’s Magazine, “The Last Days of Edgar A. Poe,” describes the writer’s iconic stache more specifically:
“He wore a dark mustache, scrupulously kept, but not entirely concealing a slightly contracted expression of the mouth and an occasional twitching of the upper lip, resembling a sneer. This sneer, indeed, was easily excited — a motion of the lip, scarcely perceptible, and yet intensely expressive. There was in it nothing of ill-nature, but much of sarcasm … ”
What other literary greats have memorable mustaches? Find out past the break, and let us know who you’d add to the list.
It’s a whole new world on Season 2 of Downton Abbey — and that world is World War I. Servants and aristocrats alike are enlisting in the army, while the women are doing what they can on the homefront, and people from all walks of life are wondering how the conflict will affect Britain’s deeply entrenched class system. One episode in, we’ve only gotten a small taste of the Great War, but it’s reminded us of what a fascinating (and often horrifying) historical moment it was. If Downton has you curious to read more about the war, we’ve got just the book list for you. Nine great novels about World War I are after the jump.
The epigraph is a funny literary convention: excerpting lines of someone else’s work — or quotes, adages, lines of verse, lyrics, snippets of conversation, etc — to put before your own. The effect varies: often the epigraph serves as a sort of thematic gatekeeper, or simply sets the mood for the prose to come, sometimes it gives the reader a glimpse into the author’s intentions or inspirations, or it may serve as a joke or warning. They may seem a trivial part of the work they come attached to, but we think, if done properly, they can be very illuminating. In case you couldn’t tell, we’ve been thinking about the convention quite a bit lately, partly due to the numerous hours we’ve spent perusing one of our new favorite Tumblrs, Epigraphic, which collects the fragments. Some are funny, some are poignant, some are strange, but all of them are wonderful in their own way. Click through to read 25 of our all-time favorite epigraphs in literature, and let us know if we’ve missed any of your own favorites in the comments!
[Editor's note: While your Flavorwire editors take a much-needed holiday break, we're revisiting some of our most popular features of the year. This post was originally published June 19, 2011.] Sigh. Authors just don’t insult each other like they used to. Sure, Martin Amis raised some eyebrows when he claimed he would need brain damage to write children’s books, and recent Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan made waves when she disparaged the work that someone had plagiarized, but those kinds of accidental, lukewarm zingers are nothing when compared to the sick burns of yore. It stands to reason, of course, that writers would be able to come up with some of the best insults around, given their natural affinity for a certain turn of phrase and all. And it also makes sense that the people they would choose to unleash their verbal battle-axes upon would be each other, since watching someone doing the same thing you’re doing — only badly — is one of the most frustrating feelings we know. So we forgive our dear authors for their spite. Plus, their insults are just so fun to read. Click through for our countdown of the thirty harshest author-on-author burns in history, and let us know if we’ve missed any of your favorites in the comments!
[Editor's note: While your Flavorwire editors take a much-needed holiday break, we're revisiting some of our most popular features of the year. This post was originally published June 12, 2011.] It’s a well-known stereotype that many literary authors are also raging drunkards. Which, forgive us, doesn’t make us want to emulate them any less. In fact, now that it’s summer, we can’t think of anything better than to sip a cool drink while typing away at our — er, laptops — out on the porch in the sweet summer night air. So in the interest of pure academic speculation, we’ve comprised a roundup of some of our favorite writers and the drinks they favored during all their late work nights and boozy afternoons. We’re not saying that downing a mojito will make you write like Hemingway, but hey — it couldn’t hurt. Click though for our list, and let us know what beverages you favor during your own deep contemplations and compositions.
