Which writer had the most sad life?

Can confirm this guy

Oh boo fucking hoo, his daddy didn't love him.

His sisters had a worse life, they literally died in the concentration camps.

I've recently become interested in Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo who led a pretty depressing life. He lived in poverty, his daughter died and he ended up killing himself.

Everyone in Shakespeare's life dropped like dead flies.

...

Anne frank

>fictional character

Elliot Rodger

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What?

what was his mental hmollnesd

>6 foot
>dashing, interesting face
>literary genius
>considered athletic, charismatic and witty by friends
>multiple affairs with women
>worked part time and then spent the rest of his time indulging in his passion
>90% of his suffering was self-imposed, and he even admitted this much in his diaries

fuck Kafka and his "miserable" life. By definition, there have been little to no great writers with terrible lives, because the fact that they are a great writer means that they at least did something with their life. The most miserable writers wouldn't be anyone who made a "great depressing work about characters suffering," but the failed writers that died lonely kissless virgins, whose work was never recognized and lost to the ether, who you will never know or care to know. The people who are most miserable don't have the energy or motivation or hope left to create beautiful works out of their misery.

as far as well-known writers, Solzhenitsyn gets my vote. although like says all of the unknown failed writers out there who never got published for one reason or another despite a lifetime of hard work and talent have it worse.

All that great writing that was never discovered because depressed writers destroyed it or didn't know anyone that could have published it against their will after they died. Oh man.

Easy

I'd say Sylvia Plath. She attempted suicide while in college, allegedly recovered.
Then she married Ted Hughes, he beat her and she had miscarriage because of that and who knows what else happened between them. Then she offed herself finally.

t. femanon

I'm not saying Sylvia had an easy life psychologically but if you think she had it the worst you are kidding yourself.

Nietzsche.

Riddled with terrible crippling physical and mental illness, rejected by women all his life, rejected by academia all his life, poor and completely solitary all his life with no reason for living other than writing.

Or maybe Pessoa, whose early life was so marked by loss that he could only connect with imaginary friends as an adult, except for the one friend he had, who killed himself. He also died an alcoholic virgin.

>t. femanon
Nope, sadly. Ted Hughes' second wife killed her child and then killed herself. The son of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes also killed himself in 2009.

sounds pretty average to me

>Nope, sadly.
>sadly

What was so special about him psychologically besides his daddy complex? Just another neurotic Jew.

In fact by his dream notes you can see he had pretty boring dreams. My dreams are way weirder so i must be much more fucked up than he was.

>tfw you realize that Kafka was practically a normie compared to you
fucker had it easy desu

Makes you wonder what would be Nietzche's life if he had access to Veeky Forums.

My guess is that he would be a /pol/tard.

Walter Benjamin
Thomas Bernhard
Michel Houellebecq
Celan
Ingeborg Bachmann

He had gainful employment, friends, and girlfriends. Bona fide normalfag desu.

Pessoa was also a normalfag. Read solid Portuguese sources instead of bullshit Anglo historiography that tries to paint him as a sadboy.

Musil just got poorer and poorer.

>small weak frame, narrow shoulders
>bland moody face
>never recognized at his time
>his dad didn't love him
>wageslave in an environment most unfit for his character
He was a regular visitor of prostitutes. Women were easier to get in his time. I can only give you the "had firends" part.
Self-imposed but inescapable. Is there any fate worse than this? Because, what did any external success even matter when the guy was not content with himself?

The Japanese Kafka to be honest

Never trust enigmas or 'legends'.

Read Kafka during my years as a student.

Now I am not a scholar or historian concerning Kafka and his works, but I did find the cult en legend a bit suspicious. Some of his works are impressive none the less.

Then last year read pic related and was annoyed that I had succumbed to a possible fad and fantasy. Put into context, according to this book, Kafka lived quite a 'decent' life far removed from the illusions we built around his legend.I did not lose my admiration for his works, though it did drastically alter my approach and understanding towards K.

Again, I am not a historian or scholar concerning Kafka, however I suspect K is misunderstood. And I don't mean this in any mystical sense.

Don't trust a text without its context.

tfw no qt literary gf

Is there some writer who didn't have any affairs with women?

Imagine being arguably the greatest of all American writers, and arguably one of the greatest writers in the history of the English language, and dying poor and in obscurity. Melville's life may not be as shitty as Kafka's was, but the degree to which he went unappreciated in his lifetime is probably greater.

I'm not sure it is a cult of personality case here. The guy was fixated on the parent figure and his whole worldview was that of an endless chain of authoritarian relationships.
He was the protagonist in his stories, had sense of the futility of his situation, and kept on living that hell instead of an heroing or taking a 180 turn

I agree that Kafka's life wasn't the saddest out of all poets. And I dislike the metamorphosis as well, I find it too morbid... but his other works make up for it.

Me.

>The most miserable writers wouldn't be anyone who made a "great depressing work about characters suffering," but the failed writers that died lonely kissless virgins, whose work was never recognized and lost to the ether, who you will never know or care to know.
fug...

>Pessoa was also a normalfag.

Is this true? If it is I'm... disappointed.

Rudolf Těsnohlídek's life was pretty shit (he's mostly known for writing the source material that Janacek used to write his opera Cunning Little Vixen)

>Born in Caslav
>Fairly middle of the road childhood
>When a teenager, he's walking with his best friend who slips and falls into a frozen lake. Rudolf is paralysed with shock and watches him drown. Adopts a pessimistic, melancholic attitude that will last the rest of his life
>Goes to uni in Prague, doesn't finish
>Meets a qt with whom he falls in love. She's as melancholic as him. They go to Norway on their honeymoon to a small village where one of their joint favourite writers was born
>One day, his wife is playing with a small revolver. Rudolf asks her to put it down since it's making him nervous. She tells him that he thinks that she doesn't have the nerve to kill herself. So she shoots herself in the heart.
>Rudolf blunders along to the police station but doesn't really speak much Norwegian. The police arrest him thinking that he murdered his wife. After two trials, he is eventually acquitted
>Goes to Brno and starts writing for a local paper, mostly covering the local magistrate court.
>He marries again and achieves his breakthrough with "Vixen Sharp Ears" which is serialised in the paper and widely praised.
>His editor takes him off the magistrate coverage to encourage him to write more things in the style of "Vixen Sharp Ears"
>Rudolf thinks that this is a bad thing instead of a good thing and that the paper wants rid of him. His second wife leaves him around this point as well. He remarries again.
>He starts becoming fascinated with deep cave systems and spends hours exploring them and writing extensive articles for the paper. However they are fairly dull and so get extensively edited without his knowledge and often don't even get published.
>Ends up writing the humorous poetry corner of the paper. One day, when everyone is out to lunch he writes his suicide note as one of these humorous poems and shoots himself in the chest at his desk because he didn't want to spoil his "little bird's [wife's] nest" by doing it at home. He is found by a colleague but dies there
>When his third wife found out, she shut herself in her kitchen and gassed herself to death.

Bukowski's life until his mid 20s was pretty miserable.

Motherfuck...
He brought death and misery with him

How about reading Pessoa himself? He's written extensive self-analysis that shows how sad he really was.

And I'm lusophone, so most of what I read about Pessoa is from Portuguese sources. I'm not sure what qualifies a normalfag to you, maybe his flânerie and bohemian behavior, but his depression is very much documented.

EAP died miserably in as much obscurity after a slew of bad luck

Poe's sad life may be evident in what he wrote about but he lived his own version of Hell. Everyone he ever cared about died suddenly and I can't imagine he was ever happy maybr at the end when he was on his death-bender.

this big boy

Giacomo Leopardi

>died in the concentration camps

Reminder that success with women and friends/social circle doesn't matter. This autist here died a virgin and was perfectly content with his life

Yep this gal here

What about Otto Weininger and Philip Mainlander?

...

This

>no one has posted dfw yet

What blows my mind about Kafka is how *not sad* his life was, considering how intensely solipsistic his writing is. He had friends, plenty of lovers, a bunch of good jobs, and died because of illness. That's basically all any of us can expect. Sure he was an anorexic hypochondriac who occasionally was institutionalized but there have been millions of people like that, and pretty much all of them live with their parents and never contributed anything to art or culture.

There are lots of writers with sadder lives than Kafka. Gogol had a really sad life. I think it was Dostoevsky who describes him as being this outcast loser in the artistic milieu of the time. And he ended his life as a totally psychotic schizo, in a mental hospital. Breece D'J Pancake also lived a shit life -- you can't imagine that his bizarre name helped. Grew up dirt poor in West Virginia, struggled his whole life in obscurity, and killed himself. There are lots of depressing suicide stories of course, Kleist, Akutagawa, Mishima, John Kennedy Toole etc. etc.

Yeah, but Poe wasn't as great as Melville.

Why has no one mentioned Walser. He's the ultimate sad boi

>be Leopardi
>cripple, with other terribly painful ailments
>literally 4'7
>terribly deformed, meaty hunchback
>his face was downright creepy
>manic depression
>terrible costant headaches
>almost blind
>his stomach hurt like hell for his entire life, getting asleep while crying in pain was normal to him
>he was fairly healthy in his childhood, but he spent it studying, which lead to immense regrets (read his poems and you'll understand)
>loved 2 women in his life, the first one dies in her teenagehood, the second one has a liason with his only good friend, and then proceed to ghost him
>tried to have sex with prostitutes once, children that were started mocking him and throwing stones at him (they used to call him "fottuto gobbo" or "fucking hunchback")
>dirty poor for his entire life
>is respected by his peers, but in his lifetime his poetry is vastly overshadowed by more conventional poets (although Italians intellectuals loved them, they thought that the pessimism in his poems was a flaw)
>had only one good friend, Antonio Ranieri
>that good friend mocked him costantly, and thought that Giacomo was a closeted homosexual who had a mancrush for him
>Giacomo knew about what Ranieri was saying behind his back, and was deeply hurt by it
>in his 30s his lungs go to shit
>in his mid 30s his body stops working: he can't see anymore in the daylight, pain is costant and unbearable, complete lack of stamina, so much that he could not walk for more than 5 minutes, and always with a cane, and he could not climb stairs (Antonio had to take him up on his back)
>by the time he is 38 he is absolutely sure he will die
>live the shittiest life a terminal patient can live for another year, then die, with only Antonio at his side

Seriously, how can anyone compete with Leopardi's life? Only a sadist could have designed his life this way, it's so horrible that it's almost comical, especially when coupled with the greatest lyrical talent that Italy has ever seen. Poor, poor soul.

This can't be real. Life can't be that bad.

...

>perfectly content with his life
HAHAHA
He was probably content in not having sex but he wasn't content or happy. He was on the verge of nervous breakdowns all throughout his life.

Sad that he thought he was a failure and would be forgotten. Ironic that he would become the most popular weird tales author while the most popular author of the magazine then was Seabury Quinn is forgotten today.

For good reason. His depression was no cake walk but he had a supportive family, academic and athletic success, became a smash phenomenon and used that to bang co-eds at a third-rate state school while he lived with his dogs and ate cheetos.

I'll throw my hat in for this guy as far as unpublished before death outcasts go:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Darger

especially depressing that I'd never even heard of him.. dam

This. I roll my eyes every time I hear this guy's name.

I guess he's sad in the same way Chris-chan and /MLP/ are sad.

I always thought Orwell was pretty sad, it got better in his later years though. He was a chronically ill boy thrown from a relatively comfy middle class family into a hardass boarding school full of rich snobs who hated him and thought he was a pleb. There's a great essay about his childhood where he lays out the absolute absurity and injustice that his boarding school life was like. After graduating, his childhood friend rejected his marriage proposal so he went to Burma to become a police officer. He wasn't good at that either so he eventually went back to England to wander around different urban areas and chronicle the lives of the poor, while always living on the edge of poverty himself.

if you know any ''authors'' hang yourself dweeb

Robert Walser.

>mother was manic depressive
>never held down a proper job
>lived in borderline poverty for almost his entire life
>3 of his 5 siblings committed suicide, the other two died on cancer
>spent most of his life in complete isolation
>eventually had a nervous breakdown and spent the last 30-something years of his life in a mental hospital
>never had a single romantic relationship in his entire life, and it is almost certain that he never lost his virginity

im jew and really relate w/ kafka's psychologically fuckedness
maybe all jews are that psychologically fucked

Do you think it's the circumcision?

i don't even know really
non-jews who are circumcised usually aren't as psychologically fucked

It's the feeling of not belonging.

I relate to Kafka as well, but I'm not jewish

>which famous writer, AKA someone world class at the most superior form of artistic expression, had a sad life?

The Diary was written by her father after the war.

eae men

>Bukowski's life until his mid 20s was pretty miserable.
Excuse me, why?

Borges's life was pretty shitty but he did a good job of hiding it.

Shit user, recommend me something by him.

Not a bad life at all. Shame about going blind, but at least he didn't flip out like poor Nietzsche.

Nazis deny WWII ever happened now. And if it did, it was Polish Jews who started it.
Flat(head)earthers, man.

Hölderlin led a pretty sad life

His father was retarded, his mother was a little loveable but totally submissive to his father.
He was all fucked up in his face and didn't have any girl attention in his youth.
I read Ham On Rye and he didn't live an easy life.

Excerpt from "Night Song of a Wandering Shepard in Asia":
And old man, gray, infirm,
Half-clad, and barefoot, he,
Beneath his burden bending wearily,
O'er mountain and o'er vale,
Sharp rocks, and briars, and burning sand,
In wind, and storm, alike in sultry heat
And in the winter's cold,
His constant course doth hold;
On, on, he, panting, goes,
Nor pause, nor rest he knows;
Through rushing torrents, over watery wastes;
He falls, gets up again,
And ever more and more he hastes,
Torn, bleeding, and arrives at last
Where ends the path,
Where all his troubles end;
A vast abyss and horrible,
Where plunging headlong, he forgets them all.
Such scene of suffering, and of strife,
O moon, is this our mortal life.
In travail man is born;
His birth too oft the cause of death,
And with his earliest breath
He pain and torment feels: e'en from the first,
His parents fondly strive
To comfort him in his distress;
And if he lives and grows,
They struggle hard, as best they may,
With pleasant words and deeds to cheer him up,
And seek with kindly care,
To strengthen him his cruel lot to bear.
This is the best that they can do
For the poor child, however fond and true.
But wherefore give him life?
Why bring him up at all,
If _this_ be all?
If life is nought but pain and care,
Why, why should we the burden bear?
O spotless moon, such _is_
Our mortal life, indeed;
But thou immortal art,
Nor wilt, perhaps, unto my words give heed.
[...]
My flock, now resting there, how happy thou,
That knowest not, I think, thy misery!
O how I envy thee!
Not only that from suffering
Thou seemingly art free;
That every trouble, every loss,
Each sudden fear, thou canst so soon forget;
But more because thou sufferest
No weariness of mind.
When in the shade, upon the grass reclined,
Thou seemest happy and content,
And great part of the year by thee
In sweet release from care is spent.
But when _I_ sit upon the grass
And in the friendly shade, upon my mind
A weight I feel, a sense of weariness,
That, as I sit, doth still increase
And rob me of all rest and peace.
And yet I wish for nought,
And have, till now, no reason to complain.
What joy, how much I cannot say;
But thou _some_ pleasure dost obtain.
My joys are few enough;
But not for that do I lament.
Ah, couldst thou speak, I would inquire:
Tell me, dear flock, the reason why
Each weary breast can rest at ease,
While all things round him seem to please;
And yet, if _I_ lie down to rest,
I am by anxious thoughts oppressed?

Perhaps, if I had wings
Above the clouds to fly,
And could the stars all number, one by one,
Or like the lightning leap from rock to rock,
I might be happier, my dear flock,
I might be happier, gentle moon!
Perhaps my thought still wanders from the truth,
When I at others' fortunes look:
Perhaps in every state beneath the sun,
Or high, or low, in cradle or in stall,
The day of birth is fatal to us all.

You should read literally everything by him, the man was a genius and imo even better than Dante
Are you, i dare to say, fucking retarded?

Read his Canti, and keep in mind that he is cinsidered the best Italian poet alongside Dante and Petrarca: Veeky Forumsizens who son't know him are just philistines.

Didn't he also lose his virginity at like 24 to some obese chick? I remember watching a video of him telling that story

The thing with Kafka is that it's not just about the circumstances his life which seem fine on the surface of it. It's about his hyper-sensitivity making him see and feel everything a lot more intensely than you might think reasonable. He was just a sensitive soul with a lot of daddy issues