The strange-but-true tales of the rumors, idiosyncrasies, and feuds of literary legends—including Agatha Christie, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Shakespeare, and more

This fascinating—and shocking!—tour through the lives of classic literature icons is the perfect stocking stuffer for book lovers and fans of little-known history.

With outrageous and uncensored profiles of everyone from William Shakespeare to Thomas Pynchon, Secret Lives of Great Authors tackles all the tough questions your high school teachers were afraid to ask: What’s the deal with Lewis Carroll and little girls? Is it true that J. D. Salinger drank his own urine? How many women—and men—did Lord Byron actually sleep with? And why was Ayn Rand such a big fan of Charlie’s Angels? Classic literature was never this much fun in school!

Authors included:
William Shakespeare
Lord Byron
Honoré de Balzac
Edgar Allan Poe
Charles Dickens
The Brontë Sisters
Henry David Thoreau
Walt Whitman
Leo Tolstoy
Emily Dickinson
Lewis Carroll
Louisa May Alcott
Mark Twain
Oscar Wilde
Arthur Conan Doyle
W.B. Yeats
H.G. Wells
Gertrude Stein
Jack London
Virginia Woolf
James Joyce
Franz Kafka
T.S. Eliot
Agatha Christie
J.R.R. Tolkien
F. Scott Fitzgerald
William Faulkner
Ernest Hemingway
Ayn Rand
Jean-Paul Sartre
Richard Wright
William Burroughs
Carson McCullers
J.D. Salinger
Jack Kerouac
Kurt Vonnegut
Toni Morrison
Sylvia Plath
Thomas Pynchon