Curated playlist
Writers of Gothic fiction
- Charles DickensAt twelve, Charles Dickens pasted labels on boot blacking pots in a rat-infested warehouse.
- Stephen KingA minivan hit Stephen King on a Maine road in June 1999. A dog in the back distracted the driver.
- Edgar Allan PoeEdgar Allan Poe's executor used forged letters to paint him as a drunken madman.
- Oscar WildeOscar Wilde was convicted at the height of his fame, with two plays running in London's West End.
- Herman MelvilleHerman Melville's death notice misspelled his great novel as "Mobie Dick."
- Walter ScottWalter Scott owed £130,000 and refused any help. The novelist wrote his way out of ruin instead.
- H. P. LovecraftH. P. Lovecraft died in 1937 virtually unknown to readers. His monsters later became global touchstones.
- Henry JamesNovelist Henry James was hissed at when he took a bow on his play's opening night in 1895.
- Percy Bysshe ShelleyPoet Percy Bysshe Shelley's body was identified partly by a copy of Keats's Lamia in his jacket.
- Jules VerneJules Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979. Only Agatha Christie ranks higher.
- Mary ShelleyMary Shelley conceived Frankenstein in a waking dream after Lord Byron proposed a ghost story contest.
- Jane AustenJane Austen died in 1817 without her name on any of her novels. Her first book said only "By a Lady."
- Lewis CarrollOn a rowing trip in July 1862, Lewis Carroll invented a story for three sisters.
- Robert Louis StevensonRobert Louis Stevenson was left out of a 2,000-page Oxford anthology in 1973.
- Neil GaimanNeil Gaiman is the first author to win both the Carnegie Medal and the Newbery Medal for the same book.
- Victor HugoVictor Hugo asked for a pauper's funeral and got the largest in French history.
- Arthur Conan DoyleArthur Conan Doyle once bowled out the famous cricketer W. G. Grace and wrote a poem about it.
- Nathaniel HawthorneNathaniel Hawthorne paid $100 to print his first novel, then tried to suppress every surviving copy.
- Mary WollstonecraftMary Wollstonecraft died eleven days after giving birth to the daughter who would write Frankenstein.
- Michael CrichtonMichael Crichton once submitted a George Orwell essay as his own and got a B-minus.
- Robert E. HowardRobert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, died at thirty with almost none of his work in a book.
- Leonid AndreyevLeonid Andreyev sold a quarter-million copies of his first book in 1901. The Russian writer died poor in Finland at 48.
- Aleksey Konstantinovich TolstoyCount Aleksey Tolstoy co-created Kozma Prutkov, a fake poet many readers thought was real.