Something I've been wondering: are there any genuinely good writers whose careers and reputations were ultimately...

Something I've been wondering: are there any genuinely good writers whose careers and reputations were ultimately destroyed by their atrocious actions? For instance, a brilliant or innovative writer who was later revealed to be, say, a serial killer. Please refrain from memeing me/derailing the thread, I'm actually genuinely interested. Pic unrelated

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Painted_Bird
vanityfair.com/style/2006/04/jtleroy200604
washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/02/19/how-a-13-year-olds-one-line-blog-post-became-a-worldwide-meme/
abclocal.go.com/three/kabc/kabc/My-Twisted-World.pdf
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

oh yeah.
I recall a university refusing to teach Aristotle or Schopenhauer because of their views on women.
I know people who refuse to read or watch Zizeks social or religious commentaries because of his economic views.
And a good few dislike your pic unrelated and his mentor because they were diddlers and homos.

Separate the idea from the man. An idea is just that, an idea. If somebody has good ideas amidst bad ideas, saying those good ideas are good is no crime on our part.

There was some fella from the 40s-50s who was a Nazi supporter and his writing just got totally BTFO for it

oscar wilde

ezra pound?

Nah, less popular. I wish i could recall the guy's name

paul de man

That could be him, but i feel like it wad a novelist

Wyndham Lewis?

Quebec used to have the Jutra awards in honour of the late Claude Jutra who was probably the biggest name in Quebec's film history. It's been discovered he was a pedophile and had relations with underage girls and his name has been promptly removed from the award. It sparked a debate about how much should we remove an author from his work.

A counter-example to this though would be Celine and his antisemitism, he supposedly cooperated with the nazis during the occupation of France. I don't have an extensive knowledge of the guy but he wrote a preface to "Journey to the End of the Night" (Of which I only read an introduction and the first two chapters) saying he regrets what he had written, but he's a bit ambiguous about it and it seems more driven by regret for what his name has come to be associated with in the end of his days. Anyway, his books are still being found in bookstores but his name isn't as widely known among my academic setting so perhaps this is also a case of censure.

Actually upon glancing at the thread again,
is who I'm talking about

CELINE is less popular than EZRA POUND????

The unabomber?

A holocaust denier per the wiki

Celine obviously comes to mind due to his antisemitic views and overt Nazi support. However, I do not think his status as a writer has suffered too much from it; he is still widely considered, in France at least, a major writer and is quoted frequently.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Painted_Bird

vanityfair.com/style/2006/04/jtleroy200604

This guys plagiarised a terminally ill 16 year old girl's diary and made a book out of it once she died called The Faultline of Stars or something

George Orwell, a filthy snitch

Despite his lifelong socialist views, in 1949, a year before his death at 46, Orwell gave the government a list of people he thought were Stalinist sympathizers or "fellow travelers."

There's Günter Grass, who revealed in 2006 that he had been a member of the Waffen-SS. Could this be the novelist remembered by ?

Milan Kundera was accused of denouncing somebody to the Czechoslovakian police in 1950, but these allegations are disputed.

Austrian Johann "Jack" Unterweger became a writer and journalist after release from a prison sentence for murder. He went on to commit a further series of killings, for which he was eventually arrested and convicted of nine murders

any sources on this?

As far as I know, the allegations did not hurt Kundera's career at all

Not quite what you're asking for, but historical detective fiction writer Anne Perry was Juliet Hulme, one of the two girls convicted as teenagers of murdering the other's mother in New Zealand in the 1950s, in a case that was the basis of Peter Jackson's film Heavenly Creatures.

I don't think they did: he was widely supported by other writers, and the evidence is strongly disputed.

James Frey

His wikipedia site

I wonder if you're thinking of PG Wodehouse?

He and his wife were living in France at the time of the Nazi occupation, and, having refused a flight out because his wife could not also come, he was initially interned (as an enemy alien under sixty), but later permitted to write and then released, allowed to live in Berlin on the German proceeds of his books, and made some radio programmes that were broadcast in the US and UK. The latter, and his acceptance of German hospitality, as some saw it, which led to his being regarded as a traitor by some, his books repudiated and removed from some libraries, and investigations by both the British and French authorities post-war, including arrest by the French; though ultimately no charges were brought.

After the war, in 1947, the Wodehouses moved to the US, where reaction had been less hostile; and PG never returned to the UK, though the government told him in the 1960s that he could return without fear of prosecution.

He was defended by others, including Orwell.

there's nothing about plagiarising a 16 year old girl's diary

He's admitted that a line widely attributed to him is not by him; but that's all I can find: see, e. g., washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/02/19/how-a-13-year-olds-one-line-blog-post-became-a-worldwide-meme/

I read her befriended a 16 year old girl when he worked at the terminal cancer ward. She let him read her diary or have it or something. Maybe its not on his page anymore

>he was initially interned (as an enemy alien under sixty)

Good, he's a hero. Fuck those commie shits.

Such a silly thing, almost anyone who was great at the time more or less supported the nazis, at the very least held similar views.

canadians are funny
i thought it's only a russian custom to rename streets from their old names but they do it for more serious reasons than allegations that somebody fucked several young boys

what do you want from sum dumb burgers
also celine was funny:

>During the Occupation of France, he wrote letters to several collaborationist journals, denouncing the Jews.[15] Even some Nazis thought Céline's antisemitic pronouncements were so extreme as to be counter-productive. Bernhard Payr, the German superintendent of propaganda in France, considered that Céline "started from correct racial notions" but his "savage, filthy slang" and "brutal obscenities" spoiled his "good intentions" with "hysterical wailing".[16][17]
>In February 1944, while Céline was having dinner in the German embassy in Paris with his friends Jacques Benoist-Méchin, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle and Gen Paul, he asserted to German ambassador Otto Abetz that Hitler was dead and had been replaced by a Jewish double.[21]

Return to /pol/, you sick fuck.

>Implying Disney and Ford aren't enough to prove his point

Not even memeing.

Multi-disciplinary shortlist
>Celine, Pound, Hamsun, Eliade, Mishima, Jünger, Heidegger, Cioran, Spengler, Evola (inb4), Lindbergh, Dali, Jung

Are you sure that wasn't his plan all along?

Some on that list (e.g., Spengler) weren't Nazis.

The rest are pseuds.

The author of Mein Kampf for one

I did also include similar views, like Dali who was a falangist or Cioran and Eliade who were both supporters of the Iron Guard at the time (though Cioran later renounced it)

Knut Hamsun.
Nobel price winner, his books were burned.

You should rethink your ability to brand people "pseuds" especially with no explanation. It actually makes these writers look better than they are when you disavow them like that.

Father of the modern novel, but they want us to forget him.

That list isn't almost everyone 'great' is it. Funny you slip Jung in there who wasn't a nazi. Antisemitism was mainstream back then.

Take it back to /pol/, you Nazi shithead.

He's not the father of the modern novel and he should be forgotten. He's boring as fuck which you'd know if you read him instead of remembering his name to splash propaganda here.

He was probably referring to you labelling heidegger a "pseud".
Because Heidegger was clearly a nazi, and the most influential philosopher of the last century.
Anyway, I agree with you on the fact that nazi ideas weren't "widespread". Anti-semitism was, but writers sympathetic to nazism were very few, and these weren't deeply anchored beliefs, Nazism being a very fragile and changing ideology, and still very recent at the time. + one shouldn't forget the importance of other political movements which were also on the rise, eventhough not as much in litterary circles, at the time ; new positivism, communism, "americanism", etc.

>Because Heidegger was clearly a nazi, and the most influential philosopher of the last century.

Heidegger wrote indecipherable gibberish. He was a professional bullshit-monger.

If that's your opinion then you're just ignorant. You know carnap & such actually understood heidegger and disagreed ? Their criticism weren't only based on his style.
I thought on a litterary board people would not shit their pants after the first neologism. Because really that's the only hard thing to get about heidegger's philosophy, his vocabulary. Past that there's nothing complicated. Since your american (probably) and you don't seem to be deep into academics, I suggest you try the lectures of Hubert Dreyfus on youtube. He makes a good job at making it simple.

*you're
Fuck y'ou'rre barbaric language

I have a PHD in philosophy. Heidegger absolutely wrote utter nonsense for a living. And Hubert Dreyfus is a moron.

You know, it was the Jews who came up with the label "Nazi".

Why don't you call him a National Socialist shithead? Or is that too scary?

see

>socialists
>stalinists
I don't see what's wrong here.

I've always found it stupid that Heidegger is dismissed as some sort of Nazi sympathiser.

Even if that IS the case, his work was so difficult to penetrate (and nigh impossible to simplify) that he'd have been familiar to few beyond the most philosophically inclined.

Whatever his support for his Nazis, more to the point, there's very little way his work could even be used for that cause. He invented most of his own terminology, and thus the thinking that followed; it would have been entirely divorced from the contemporary/prolish discourse of the time that would have informed the pop-philosophy that 99% of people were running on regardless.

Ernst Junger was part of the conservative opposition to the nazis and kept his distance from them. (read "On the Marble Cliffs") - Carl Jung was no nazi. Dude was Sigmund Freud's protege for many years.

Wittgenstein>Heidegger

He was right but we won't listen

Hamsun, to some extent.

Who?

abclocal.go.com/three/kabc/kabc/My-Twisted-World.pdf

The guy that wrote this masterpiece went a little crazy and ended up killing some people.

de sade?

ted kaczynski

Honestly, I think you are mistaken. I deeply appreciate his autistic madman ramblings and if he had not committed those murders I had never bothered to listen to his audio book (read by a robot female).

heidegger?

>I have a PHD in philosophy.
And I go to Princeton.

david irving's career as a history writer started out well but anything he does has turned toxic because of this

apparently he now runs tours of concentration camps going LOOK! JUST LOOK HOW FLIMSY THIS DOOR IS and crap like that

...

journey to the end of the night is extremely well known
source: i don't know shit about lit yet I have heard of it

>Dali was a falangist
that's the funniest thing I have heard this year

>Ph.D in Philosophy
>Starts with appeal to authority

Oh so you're a hack? Get your money back

Orwell was a democratic socialist; Stalinists and members of the Communist Party were not. During his participation in the Spanish Civil War, he saw this first hand, when he was among those non-Communists accused of being fascists by those they had considered allies.

Back home in the UK in the early 1940s, Special Branch suspected Orwell of being a Communist himself, but MI5 knew he was not in sympathy with the Party..