Why Are Writers So Fucked Up?

The list is incomplete...

William S. Burroughs: Pederast, Homosexual, Junklie, shot his wife in a drunken accident
Herman bang: Hypersensitive faggot
isidore Ducasse: Angsty Emo kid, most probably commited suicide
Gustav Wied: Chronically depressed, comitted suicide
Jack kerouac: Drank himself to death at his moms place after failing to aquire his golden eternity wisdom all alone in the wilderness
Michael Strunge: Bipolar. Jumped off a roof
Fernando Pessoa: Arguably borderline schizo
Antonin Artaud: Schizophrenic
Phillip K Dick: Drug Addict, Major psychosis

the list goes on. Its not just authors though. Painters, musicians, actors, composers, philosophers. Nietzche went batshit insane. So did Van Gogh. Coltrane drank himself to death. And so forth and so forth

More. someone write another list

What do we conclude from this? Are we really brainlet enough to just leave it at "they fucked in the head nigga"

Bipolar disorder and family history of schizophrenia is correlated with creativity (as in, the production of significant creative works). One of the first studies to show this was conducted at the University of Iowa using the participants in the Iowa Writer's Workshop as subjects.
Both have high rates of suicide.

Wittgenstein gave all his money (vast fortune) to his siblings, who all committed suicide.

Sample bias. In order to get interested in literature you have to be secluded in the first place.

who is this semen demon

Knut Hamsung: insufferable cunt, nazi sympathizer, would go on drinking sprees and close the night by wrecking the bar throwing around furniture (look up Johs. V. Jensen's poem Helled Haagen for a poetic description)
Descartes: Social Anxiety, hypersentitive and hypocondriac. Hid in the closet to do his thinking, or spent days in bed staring at the ceiling (he supposedly invented analytic geometry by observing flies in the ceiling)
Francis Bacon: drunkard, gambler and sociopath, treated all his friends like shit
Charles Bukowski: Notorious alcoholic, womanizer and wife beater

see also: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Writers_who_committed_suicide

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Writers_who_committed_suicide

LMAO can't believe this exists.

Also Heidegger, apparently his entire philosophy was really an excuse for his Nazi beliefs.

His granddaughter and father did as well

kek just memorized this whole list. Going to ask my teacher in class why this is the case.

artaud was more than just schizophrenic

makes you wonder... maybe society is the one who's fucked up and we're the sane ones...

Pynchon - Recluse. Batshit insane, paranoid.
Salinger - Recluse. Wrote constantly for the last 40 years of his life but never published it or let anyone even SEE it. Had long affair with some girl about a hundred years younger than him.
Shelley - Crazy as a box of frogs. Bullied at school (nickname was "Mad Shelley"). Went sailing despite total incompetence in all practical matters. Drowned.
Thomas Hardy - Hilariously depressive. As a child, was once discovered lying down in the mud next to a dead sheep "to try to feel what being dead felt like".
Ezra Pound - Ranted about Usury, worried he was undersexed because he only had two mistresses in Paris (he was married at the time). Wrote dozens of letters per day. Vigorously supported Mussolini, got locked up for it, got released and immediately gave the Roman salute. [OK, maybe he was just awesome.]
James Thurber - Irascible, misanthropic, insomniac. Had mad family (went blind because his brother shot him in the eye with a bow and arrow in his childhood).
Dorothy Parker - Alcoholic, repeated suicide attempts. Wrote: Acids stain you / Drugs cause cramp / Razors pain you / Rivers are damp / Gas smells awful / Nooses give / Guns aren't lawful / You might as well live
Robert Benchley (& all the other Algonquins) - Raging alcoholic
William Faulkner - Raving alcoholic. Also a manlet (5'5"). Although Shelby Foote said that "when you met him he did not strike you as a small man". BEST COMPLIMENT EVER

if this was only society...

My life is more fucked up than any of the ones mentioned here, lol. We're all the same, just wearing different masks.

>Why are writers..?
Become perhaps just slightly more aware and find out? For instance, what's actually going on here (in this thread)? What's NOT being 'fucked up'? Normal? Contented? Happy?

tell us about it, user

Can't be arsed typing it out.

Just imagine batman, but 10x worse. Without the wealth, of course.

Chaucer was cleared of that rape charge, you fucker.

Honestly, I'll take Byron's

They didn't read the stoics.

Also, to counter, the majority of these traits are just enormous stubbornness in a worldview

Im gonna die from the Virgil and Thomas Hardy entries, holy shit
BUT
>Pynchon: batshit insane
As if there's any proof of this

pic related, Dennis Cooper, one of my favorite authors:

>parents were violent, raging alcoholics who left him to care for his younger siblings
>gay in the 1960s
>was a cokehead for years
>friend of his hit him over the head with an axe when he was 10 and nearly killed him
>every story is inspired by the same guy he fell in love with who committed suicide
>had a 10 hour long bad acid trip that left him unable to function properly for years
>tons of friends dead to heroin/suicide
>near necrophilic sexual deviant. Lots of pedophilia, rape and abuse in his work. Has been obsessed with death and sex since puberty.
>completed his first novel while nearly dying from measels in Amsterdam, thinking initially that it was HIV

He's apparently really friendly and personable, though.

>As if there's any proof of this
ahem

>because humans didn't evolve to write
Yet there are thousands of academic types who spend their whole lives reading and writing and aren't anywhere near as fucked up. It has to do with the fact that they're artists, I think

meant write as in the process of writing a novel

>Nobody's Perfect

Who would have thought?

That's because academic types aren't driven in the way that serious artists are.
They are, by and large, bloodless and timid people who play it safe.
No-one ever became a great writer or a great anything by playing it safe.

Sure they did. Pessoa was a timid virgin. Proust and Borges lived with their mothers, and Proust was a NEET. Emily Dickinson lived, wrote, and died in seclusion. There are many great writers who rejected danger and "played it safe"

academics that are not doing philosophy can be dismissed though, especially ones that specialized in STEM and anything that lower than that.

pure mathematician that delved deeply onto meta-mathematics on the other hands are the exception.

philosophy, or serious literature i think make oneself too self aware,

i mean without that awareness (to dissect your own perspective and your own worldview unbiasedly) you cannot "know", which is prerequisite before doing any serious and/or important discovery/writing

meta-mathematics did fucked up Godel tho.

another things, I think to be as aware like them, change many of your life priorities, hence your behavior will follow

however, i do not thing to know more or "more aware" is a curse, in comparison to let say you live and work 9 to 5 with no existential hustle and continuously content with that until your last breath - as per live and exist just to eat, work, earn, mate and die

i think it is important to know more as per these thinkers, and hopefully find meanings in our life (or not that is the conclusion that you finally earn and accept yourself)

/thread

They might have been reclusive or introverted but they never "played it safe" in their particular sphere of action.
What I mean is they always had the courage of their convictions *in their work*.

>Nabokov: Paedophile
Eat shit, dude

We don't conclude anything, because OP's retarded list doesn't constitute evidence of anything other than certain indictments of his own character.

Robert Graves - Constructed insane personal mythology about how all poets worshipped some strange White Goddess. Had a string of affairs with women he thought were the avatar of this goddess.
Philip Larkin - Total misanthrope. No wife, no children. Whinged incessantly about this (and everything else). Complained because there wasn't enough good stuff on TV in the 1980s, and by good stuff he meant (and I quote) SCHOOLGIRLS SUCKING EACH OTHER OFF WHILE YOU WHIP THEM
Marquis de Sade - Don't even ask.
Jean Genet - Petty criminal, raging sexual degenerate
Joe Orton - See above. His male lover killed him with a hammer.
John Ruskin - Most influential art critic and prose stylist of Victorian England. Learned about female anatomy from Greek statues. On his wedding night he found that real women have pubic hair. Was so shocked he never managed to consummate his marriage. His wife got VERY frustrated and I don't blame her.
A. Swinburne - Raging flagellant. Was a good verse craftsman but was much more interested in women whipping him. This affected his choice of subject-matter.

>His wife got VERY frustrated and I don't blame her.
Why? It sounds like her nasty loins were the problem, not John

Hahahahahahahahaha well phrased sir.
Maybe he was just a man ahead of his time.

read Faust

Pessoa was an alcoholic as well i think, or at least he died of an illness common in alcoholics.

William Blake: arguably completely insane, saw angels in his day-to-day life, violently beat up a soldier who accidentally walked through his garden

Ben Jonson: drunkard, egomaniac, killed a guy in a duel

You even see it in more minor writers
Garshin: hypersensitive and committed suicide
Kuprin: (another Tolstoyan novelist) wrote one good book then drank himself to death

Mario sa-Carneiro: (one of pessoa's friends) committed suicide and seemed to exhibit signs of gender dysphoria in addition to homosexuality

John Suckling (cavalier poet): chronic gambler, made fun of his mentor - Thomas Carew, who admittedly was a debauched drunkard - about the syphilis that killed him, eventually committed suicide

Thomas Bernhard: chronic misanthrope and another suicide

Gide, Goethe and Oscar Wilde were all pederasts

de Quincey and Coleridge were opium addicts, Coleridge also semi-tortured his infant son (dunking him in ice water whilst he was ~6 months old to see what would happen)

I can only a handful of writers who seem to have been relatively well adjusted individuals like Chekhov, Robert Herrick, George Herbert

Yeah, "writers who weren't a walking psychopathology textbook" might make a shorter and easier thread, haha

Arthur Conan Doyle seems like a pleasant fellow. His worst fault was that he was excessively trusting and credulous (fairies at the bottom of the garden, anyone?)

Shakespeare seems to have been pretty sane, from what we can gather.

Keats wasn't too weird - he was just sad because he was a manlet (fair enough) and the girl he liked didn't like him all that much (fair enough) and because he got tuberculosis and died at age six (fair enough).

Mark Danielewski has written some extremely disturbing stuff but he's of sound mind.

Garcia Marquez too. He had a wonderful childhood and a nice, tranquil life.

Julio Cortazar had the worst tobacco habit but aside from that he was a pretty composed individual.

Haruki Murakami is basically just some regular ass dude who decided to write at middle age.

Arthur Conan Doyle cheated on his terminally ill wife and engaged in seances to try to contact his dead son; though honestly both of those things are far from the worst things in the world (so far as i know his wife never found out and died believing in his fidelity).

I think the thing with shakespeare is that a big part of his mythos is that he is the acme of the redoubtable bourgeois fellow - i.e. his properties, attempts to be knighted etc.; like Chaucer, who was supposed to be the ultimately empathetic, kindly character, something problematised by his rape charge. If you wanted to be really nasty about it the scarce biographical details we have about shakespeare paint him as the perfect poet for Britain as a "Nation of Shopkeepers". realistically though i don't think we can know that much about him, though he was very clearly cut up over the death of Hamnet, his son, and some people think he had VD as derived from some of the speeches in Timon of Athens.

The whole thing about him wanting to become a "gentleman" is a big misconception. People assume he did it from pushy, snobbish motives. That might have had something to do with it, but much more important was that at the time it was illegal for commoners to travel around the country willy-nilly, but "gentlemen" were allowed to. So there was a purely practical consideration.

shit then, even that builds the mythos of bourgeois shakespeare - i think the whole thing of trying to reduce shakespeare (or chaucer or malory or whoever) to an archetype or a soundbite is reductive (same with all the stuff about him being a crypto-catholic or gay or whatever)

I think about killing myself every day. Does this mean i'll make a good writer?

>Virgil: Weakling manlet, once held a lavish funeral for a pet fly. Died after being in the sun a bit.
The Virgin Virgil vs. The Chad Ovid

Keats was killed by critics.

Ruskin was a Pedo FFS.

>F. Scott Fitzgerald: Tiny dick couldn’t satisfy Zelda
Hemingway confirmed this was false tho
no homo

Dude it's got to the solitude that writers dedicate. I guarantee you that all these writers spent too much time alone

>tfw my life is just as shit if not more shit than these guys
D-does that mean I'll become immortalized as a prolific author?

You'll become immortalized as a Veeky Forums poster. No-one will know your name but they will forever appreciate your talent. You'll be the 21st-century equivalent of the humble artisans who built Chartres Cathedral, knowing their names would never be known but their work would live on regardless.

Lol

>Marquis de Sade

GOD DAMN

My man Chekhov keepin' it normal hell yeah

>he supposedly invented analytic geometry by observing flies in the ceiling
impressive desu

>Lewis Carroll: Pedo
oh fuck off, i'm fed up with this shit

please stop posting cute girls it makes me sad

Has anyone on this board read all 1000 pages of his Juliette? Sounds like some sort of pleb but highly fucked up Man Without Qualities of the 18th century

William Wordsworth: abandoned his French bitty and their newborn daughter, with few moral compunctions

Charles Lamb: suffered from hereditary mental illness

Soren Kierkegaard: need I say more?

William Hazlitt: obscene and vulgar autist, lover of prostitutes

Yasunari Kawabata, Osamu Dazai, Ryunosuke Akutagawa...

Japanese writers really do have a tendency to suicide.

Source for the thing about Swift having laughed only twice his life? What were the occasions?

Thomas Bernhard didn't kill himself though