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I don’t know about you guys, but I desperately miss seeing David Tennant, Catherine Tate and John Borrowman on Doctor Who. That being said, I’ll watch any video with the three of them these days. Particularly when they involve the three singing songs and wearing goofy outfits.

Via The Mary Sue

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If you like the late, great author, then you’ll love this video. Make sure to watch him graph the third story to really enjoy his entertaining sense of humor.

Link

Maya Angelou

Education has been an important part of Angelou’s life ever since a teacher helped her recover from becoming voluntarily mute. When Maya was eight, she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend, who was beaten to death shortly after by some of her relatives. Because she believed her confession of the act was responsible for his murder, she felt that her voice was directly to blame for his death. It wasn’t until she was 13 that she learned to speak again with the help of a dedicated teacher and family friend who introduced her to classic authors such as Shakespeare, Poe and Dickens as well as black female artists like Frances Harper and Anne Spencer.

Naturally, it was only fitting that Angelou repay her gratitude by working to educate others. While writing has remained her main passion, she has also taught at a number of colleges, including the University of Kansas, Wichita State University and California State University of Sacramento. For over 20 years though, she’s remained a professor at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.

Gene Simmons

You might know him best for his epic tongue-flicking rock concerts and terrible reality shows, but long before he was the legendary make-up sporting rocker, he was Mr. Simmons, a sixth-grade teacher in Harlem. While most celebrities who used to be teachers quit to follow their dreams, Gene was fired before Kiss started taking off. As it turns out, school administrators don’t particularly like it when a teacher decides to teach Spiderman comics in place of Shakespearean plays. In Gene’s defense, he’s right that the students were probably more likely to read the comic books than the plays, but I doubt they’d get as much out of them as they would the bard’s classic works.

Image via Lokomotive74 [Wikipedia]

Sir William Golding

If you thought Lord of the Flies did an excellent job depicting the attitudes and mannerisms of preteen boys, there’s a good reason for that –Sir William Golding served as a teacher before and after his stint in WWII. He often allowed the boy’s free reign of the classroom during debate sessions, which provided him with ample inspiration for the very novel that allowed him the financial freedom to leave the teaching profession.

Sting

Before joining The Police, Sting worked as a teacher during the week, heading out to the jazz clubs during the weekends. In his own words, he claimed to be a terrible teacher, only bothering to teach the students about subjects he enjoyed. This meant they pretty much only learned poetry and soccer from the future rock star.

Image via David Shankbone [Wikipedia]

Greg Graffin

While the name might not be immediately familiar to you, punk music fans will be familiar with his band Bad Religion. But Greg isn’t your typical punk rocker, he holds a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and geology, a master’s degree in geology, and a Ph.D. in zoology. He’s also published two books. Although he started in Bad Religion when he was only 15 and has hardly needed a second job since the band struck it big, Graffin has also spent much of his adult life as a professor, teaching Life Sciences at UCLA. He even shot a pilot for a reality show called “Punk Professor,” but nothing seemed to come of it.

Image via Ricapar [Wikipedia]

Art Garfunkel

Simon & Garfunkel went on hiatus in 1970 and during that time, Art Garfunkel took advantage of his math skills by heading into the teaching field and taking a position at Litchfield Private School. Of course, a few years later, the group released their Greatest Hits album, and he retired from his teaching position after only a two years.

Andy Griffith

The man best known as Matlock wasn’t ever actually a lawyer, but he was a teacher. One of Andy’s first jobs after graduating from the University of North Carolina was as a music teacher at Goldsboro High School. He only taught for about three years before he decided to venture into entertainment, starting out doing comedy monologues at night clubs.

Stephen King

After graduating from The University of Maine with a Bachelor’s degree in English, Stephen earned a teaching certificate and immediately started seeking a job in the teaching field. Fortunately for his writing career, he couldn’t find a job right away, so he had to work at an industrial laundry facility and started writing short stories to supplement his income. Eventually in 1971, he did find a position at the Hampden Academy in Maine. He continued to write short stories in the evening during this point in his career and started developing ideas for his novels. In 1973, Carrie was accepted by Doubleday Publishing and he was able to retire from teaching and focus on his writing career.

Image via Pinguino [Flickr]

Leonard Maltin

If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to take a film class from one of the world’s most respected film historians/critics, then you’d probably enjoy enrolling in some film classes at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. Leonard Maltin previously taught at the New School for Social Research in New York for almost 10 years, but since he has become a resident of Los Angeles long ago, it’s only fitting that his teaching career follow suit.

Image via Alan Light [Flickr]

Madeleine Albright

She might be better known for her role as the first female Secretary of State, serving under Bill Clinton‘s second term, but students at Georgetown University now know her as a professor of international relations at the college’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. With her job record, along with her Ph.D from Columbia University in public law and government, I’d say she’s pretty well qualified for the job.

Bonus: Tony Danza

To be fair, Tony only taught school for the sake of an A&E reality television show called, “Teach,” so he might not really count as an authentic teacher since he didn’t go through any effort to get the position and since everyone knew it would only be a one year stint. Surprisingly, the administrators and students of the school he taught at were actually quite impressed with his performance. In fact, one of the assistant principals noted that he wished all of the new teachers on staff would grow as much as Mr. Danza did.

Have any of you ever had a teacher that was famous for something else? I had a math teacher who was on The Gong Show back in the 70’s and one of my journalism professors co-founded Guitar Player Magazine, but that’s about as big as any of my teachers ever seemed to make it.

Sources: Mental Floss, Wikipedia #1, #2, #3, #4, East Buchanan School District, The Times, Contactmusic, Yahoo Movies, AZ Central

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If you like Neil Gaiman, then you’ll probably like hearing him sing his lovely tale of Joan of Arc.

Via The Mary Sue

I don’t know about you guys, but I have a serious girl-crush on Tina Fey. It’s hard not to when the woman in question is unbelievably talented, smart, funny and beautiful. That’s why I’m so happy to get to write this Neatorama article about one of my biggest idols, who will be celebrating her forty-first birthday today. So for all you other SNL and 30 Rock fans, please join me in wishing Tina Fey a very happy birthday by enjoying these fascinating facts about one of the world’s most influential women (and that’s not just me speaking, see fact #7 for more details).

Image via David Shankbone [Flickr]

1) She Didn’t Start Out As “Tina”

Liz Lemon’s first name is actually Ms. Fey’s real first name. “Tina” was actually born Elizabeth Stamatina Fey. To be fair, at least Tina isn’t a complete stage name, it’s just not her real first name. In case you’ve ever wondered, she was born to a brokerage employee of Greek descent and a university grant proposal writer of German and Scottish descent.

2) She Has One Scary Scar Story

If you’ve ever looked closely enough at one of her movies or shows, you may have noticed that Tina has a fairly large scar on the left side of her cheek. While she refuses to talk about it, her husband finally revealed the story during a 2009 interview with Vanity Fair –and the story is a little terrifying.

According to Tina’s husband, she was playing in the front yard of her house when she was five years old and someone randomly came by and slashed her face with a razor. It happened so fast that when it happened, she thought someone marked her with a pen.

Tina says she doesn’t like to talk about the incident because she doesn’t want to seem like she is exploiting the trauma for attention. She’s also said that talking about it upsets her parents.

If you watch 30 Rock (or pretty much any of her work), you’ll notice the show overwhelmingly features her standing with her right side to the camera –that’s why.

Image via Vivanista1 [Flickr]

3) She Fell in Love With Comedy At An Early Age

As a youngster, Tina’s parents let her watch all kinds of classic comedy television including Monty Python, the Marx Brothers and The Honeymooners. Her dad was such a big fan of The Honeymooners that he refused to let her watch The Flintstones because they were a rip off of the show.

Funnily enough, she even watched two of the shows that she would later work on, SNL and Second City Television (although Tina would only appear on the stage version of The Second City, not the television program, which was cancelled before she joined the improv group).

By middle school, she had already decided that she wanted to be involved with comedy when she grew up.

4) SNL Wasn’t Her First Notable Comedy Troupe

For those of you that haven’t heard of The Second City, it was a popular improv group in Chicago where many SNL alumni got their start, including John Belushi, John Candy, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner. Tina Fey joined their ranks when she moved to Chicago after graduating from the University of Virginia with a bachelors in drama.

She took night classes with the group while working at the front desk of a YMCA to pay. Eventually, she was asked to join the cast of the improve troupe in 1994, where she performed eight shows a week for two years straight.

Second City didn’t only give her the big break she needed to get into SNL, it also introduced her to Jeff Richmond (above), a fellow actor and her future husband. He also moved to SNL (as a member of the music team) and after eight years of dating, the couple was married in a Greek Orthodox ceremony in 2001.

Image via Nick Step [Flickr]

5) She Didn’t Start Off Acting At SNL

While still working with Second City, Tina started submitting scripts to Saturday Night Live at the request of former-Second-City-performer-turned-SNL-writer Adam McKay. She was soon picked up as a writer in 1997. She wasn’t even on the show until 1998, when she appeared as an extra in one of the sketches. When she saw herself on TV, she didn’t like how she looked, so she went on a diet and lost 30 pounds. She continued to write during this period and was even promoted to the position of head writer in 1999 –making her the first female head writer on the show.

After thinning down significantly, Tina started appearing in sketches in 2000, eventually becoming a co-anchor with Jimmy Fallon on the Weekend Update segment, which is where her acting talents really started to get her noticed. After Jimmy Fallon left the show, Amy Poehler took over in his place, making it the first time in the show’s history that two women co-anchored the segment. She stayed with the show for two more years before leaving to work on 30 Rock.

6) 30 Rock Wasn’t Originally Intended to Be Auto-Biographical

When Tina first created the pilot for the show in 2002, 30 Rock was supposed to be a behind the scenes sitcom based around a cable news show. It wasn’t until NBC rejected her first attempt that Tina based the show around her experience as the head writer of a sketch-comedy show. While this pilot was accepted in 2003, the show was still put on hold until Tina finished her work with SNL, which lasted until 2006.

7) She’s Kind Of A Big Deal

Most actors and writers are considered lucky to win even a few awards for their work, but Tina Fey has won tons of them. She’s gotten seven Emmys, three Golden Globes, four Screen Actors Guild Awards, four Writer’s Guild of America Awards, one Comedy Award, one Teen Choice Award and she’s been nominated for countless others.

Entertainment Weekly named her one of their Entertainers of the Year in 2001 and 2007, and as number five in their 2009 15 Entertainers of the 2000’s list. In 2008, the Associated Press voted her the AP Entertainer of the Year as the performer with the greatest impact on culture and entertainment. The New York Post named her as one of New York’s 50 Most Powerful Women and Time named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world in both 2007 and 2009. She also was the youngest recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, and has been named three times as one of Forbes’ 100 Most Powerful Celebrities.

As if all that weren’t enough, Tina will be getting her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame some time this year.

Image via Capital M [Flickr]

She’s Undeniably Sexy.

Despite all of the 30 Rock jokes about how unattractive Liz Lemon is, there’s no denying that most of the world thinks Tina Fey is one hot milf. And she’s got the awards to prove it. In 2002, she was number 80 in Maxim’s Hot 100 List. In 2003, 2007, 2008 and 2009 she was named one of People’s Most Beautiful People. Lesbian-oriented website AfterEllen.com put her in seventh in their 2007 Hot 100 List and in 2008, she was ranked in first place on their list.

9) Her Daughter Starred In Her Own Meme

Tina Fey isn’t a stage mom and it seems unlikely that her daughter, Alice Zenobia, will appear on the big or small screens any time soon, but that didn’t stop her little girl from becoming the star or her own internet meme. The whole thing started when a paparazzi photo of Tina and Alice made its way onto the internet. Alice’s adorable swagger in the picture made her an instant star as Redditers started captioning the pic and Photoshopping Alice into other pictures. See more here and here.

Since Tina just announced that she is pregnant with her second child, it’s hard not to wonder if her new bundle of joy will ever end up making the internet rounds like little Alice has.

Image via Reddit

10) She Has No Intention of Slowing Down

To be fair, if you know much about Tina Fey, you probably know this. Although she is going to take a short break from work because she’s pregnant, she’s still got a busy schedule. 30 Rock is scheduled for another season in January 2012, she’s still busy promoting her book, Bossypants, which just came out and and she only recently hosted SNL. With so much going on for her, it’s impossible to say how much she’ll accomplish in the next few years.

Sources: Wikipedia #1, #2, #3, IMDB

Got any good Tina trivia I’ve left out? Just want to share your love for the media mogul? Feel free to share your contributions in the comments.

Dennis Upper had trouble finding content to write about for his article on writer’s block. You can view a larger image at the link. Be sure to read the comments by his first reviewer.

Link via Volokh Conspiracy

Inspired by that, SMITH Magazine invited writers, both famous and obscure, to write their memoirs in exactly six words, and published it in book form: Not Quite What I Was Planning and the sequel It All Changed in an Instant.

You can even submit your own at SMITH Magazine’s website. Some samplings there:

One week left of childhood. Anxious
Shoes perpetually untied. Yet rarely trip.
Lost fiance. Found self. Only eighteen.
Ten weeks pregnant, still my secret.

… and over at National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation:

Found on Craigslist: table, apartment, fiance.
I picked passion. Now I’m poor.
Yale at 16, downhill from there.

What’s your six-word memoir?

Today would be Jack London’s 134th birthday. The man was not only one of the most popular writers at the turn of the last century, he was also one of the first writers to see his novels be turned into a movie. In fact, his novel, The Sea Wolf, was adapted into the first full-length feature film. Also notably, he was one of the first celebrities to use his endorsement to advertise a product –in his case, grape juice and dress suits. To honor this prolific man, let’s take a look at the life and times of Jack London.

Who’s Your Daddy?

Jack London never was certain of who his actual father was, although most biographers believe his dad was astrologer William Chaney. His mother, Flora Wellman, claimed that Chaney insisted she have an abortion and that when she refused, he refused all responsibility for the child and left the city. Flora shot herself as a result of her overwhelming depression. Although she survived, she was temporarily deranged, and after Jack was born, she gave him to an ex-slave named Virginia Prentiss. After Flora married a Civil War veteran named John London, baby Jack was given back to the her, but Virginia remained a strong maternal figure to Jack throughout his life.

When Jack was 21, he searched for newspaper reports of his mother’s attempted suicide and was able to research the name of his supposed biological father. He wrote to William Chaney, but William claimed he couldn’t be Jack’s father because he was impotent. He claimed Flora slept around and that she had slandered him when she said he told her to get an abortion. Needless to say, Jack was devastated.

Education Versus Working Life

Jack grew up very working class and was forced to educate himself in the public library, as he could not afford to attend primary school. He was mentored by Oakland public librarian Ina Coolbrith who became California’s first poet laureate later on. Jack referred to Coolbrith as his “literary mother.”

At only 13, Jack started working at Hickmott’s Cannery clocking in for anywhere between 12 and 18 hours per day. In an effort to get out of this difficult life, he borrowed money from his foster mother and bought a boat. He then started working as an oyster poacher. Within only a few months, his boat was damaged beyond repair and he soon started working for the California Fish Patrol to hunt down fish poachers.

A few years later, Jack started protesting and fighting for labor unions in Kelly’s Army.  He was known for giving stump speeches on Socialism to eager-eared workers. Soon enough, he spent 30 days in jail in Buffalo on vagrancy charges. The experience disturbed him seriously and he later wrote about it:

“Man-handling was merely one of the very minor unprintable horrors of the Erie County Pen. I say ‘unprintable’; and in justice I must also say undescribable. They were unthinkable to me until I saw them.”

He returned to California where he finally started school at Oakland High. It was here, in the school magazine, that he was first published. His first story was Typhoon off the Coast of Japan, a recount of his experiences as a sailor. While attending classes, he was inspired to become a writer when he read the book Signa by Ouida, which told the story of an unschooled Italian peasant who became a famous opera composer. He credited this book as being the seed of his writing career.

After high school, Jack eventually was able to attend the University of California, Berkeley. Unfortunately, the depression he began to experience after recently hearing from his father, paired with crushing financial circumstances, forced him to leave school only a year later.

Inspiration For “Bucks”

Most people know that Jack London was part of the Klondike Gold Rush, as this was the setting for his most popular story, Call of the Wild. Not everyone knows that the main character in the story, a dog named Buck, was based on a dog that Jack’s landlords had lent to him while he stayed in Dawson.

While in the north, he developed a number of health problems, including scurvy, which eventually led to the loss of his four front teeth. The many hardships he faced during this period later served as inspiration for what is often called his greatest short story, To Build A Fire.

Breaking Into The Business

When Jack left the Klondike, he wanted to escape the difficulties of working class life and he realized his ticket out was his writing. Jack’s first work printed by a major publisher, To the Man On Trial, ended up almost causing him to quit as soon as he started because the publisher was so slow to pay and the pay itself was so low. His second published story actually ended up being his first paid assignment, as they actually came through with payment on time. Luckily, that second story’s payment gave him the motivation he needed to continue writing, he entered his field at just the right time, as magazine production (and subsequently, the market for short fiction stories) was skyrocketing due to new technologies that allowed for lower production costs.

Among the first stories he sold were Batard and Diable, which were two very similar stories about a French Canadian man who brutalized his dog, who then kills the man out of revenge. Those familiar with The Call of the Wild will recognize these plot lines as being fairly similar to the novel.

Eugenics Versus Love

Jack’s first marriage was to a friend Bessie Maddern. The couple never actually had a romantic relationship together –even after their marriage. They agreed to be married because they believed they would be able to produce strong and healthy children. While they had a loveless marriage, things remained exceptionally cordial before the children came along; Bessie edited Jack’s manuscripts and helped him improve his writing. After they had children though, the relationship became strained. Jack complained that “every time I come back after being away from home for a night she won’t let me be in the same room with her if she can help it.”

Not surprisingly, the couple’s relationship ended in divorce. Jack’s next marriage was notably more successful, largely because it was based on love and not good genes. While his nickname for Bessie was “Mother-Girl,” his nickname for his new wife, Charmian Kittredge (pictured at right), was “Mate Woman.” With Charmian, Jack found more than a friend, he found a soul mate and a lover. She had been raised without prudishness and was very open to any and all of Jack’s lustful fantasies –this certainly helped keep Jack interested, as he was known for being a bit of a womanizer at the time.

The Making of a Historic Park

Speaking of his true loves, Jack was enamored with the ranch he bought in Sonoma County in 1905, saying, “next to my wife, the ranch is the dearest thing in the world to me.” Jack wanted his ranch to become its own money making enterprise and dedicated a lot of his time to growing and improving the farm. It wasn’t long before he started writing only to support his farm. His daughter, Joan, noted that after 1910, “few reviewers bothered any more to criticize his work seriously, for it was obvious that Jack was no longer exerting himself.”

While the ranch ended up being a failure, Jack was largely ahead of his time and would likely have thrived in today’s eco-friendly world. He was one of the first U.S. farmers to practice the concept of sustainable agriculture and designed the first concrete silo built in California. His home was designed and constructed by the finest Italian and Chinese stonemasons. Unfortunately, just before the mansion was completed, it was destroyed by fire. Nowadays, his ranch is a National Historic Landmark and part of the Jack London State Historic Park.

A Rip Off Artist?

Many people, both past and present, have claimed London plagiarized much of his work. To some extent, the accusations were fair. When accused of basing The Call of the Wild on Egerton R. Young’s My Dogs in the Northland, Jack admitted that it was a “source” and he said he wrote a letter to the author thanking him for the inspiration. Jack even bought plots and novels from Sinclair Lewis and used them as his own.

The most damning case against him involved a chapter in his book The Iron Heel. Jack claimed that he based this chapter on a speech by the Bishop of London that he clipped from an American newspaper that he didn’t realize was actually an excerpt from an ironic essay by Frank Harris called “The Bishop of London and Public Morality.” Harris was angered by this use of his essay and he argued that he should receive 1/60^th of all royalties for the book.

On the other hand, some of the plagiarism accusations against Jack were merely a result of his using newspaper stories to inspire his plots. A 1901 newspaper article criticized how similar his “Moon-Face” story was to Frank Norris’ “The Passing of Cock-eye Blacklock.” London defended himself by proving that both stories were inspired by the same newspaper story. Soon, there was even a third similar story discovered to have been written about the same article. This one was published a year earlier.

When criticized for writing a story directly from a non-fiction article by Augustus Biddle and J. K Macdonald, London argued that it was fair game, saying, “I, in the course of making my living by turning journalism into literature, used material from various sources which had been collected and narrated by men who made their living by turning the facts of life into journalism.”

A Contradictory Nature

Like most of us, Jack London was an extremely complex individual. As a result, many of his views seemed contradictory, even hypocritical. He was a life-long socialist, but was devoted to monetary pursuits. While he always looked to his black foster mother as a role model and worried about the white man destroying indigenous cultures, he also bought into Social Darwinism and eugenics. While he was a self-proclaimed alcoholic, he supported prohibition.

Death and Conspiracies

Jack died in 1916 of uremia. The kidney stones and dysentery he was suffering from at the time were extremely painful, so he was taking morphine, which may have contributed to his death. Because he wrote so many stories about people who killed themselves though, many people mistook his death for a suicide.

A decade later, a writer known as B. Traven started to become known as “the German Jack London.” This author kept his identity secret his entire life, which led to some people speculating that Jack actually was B. Traven. Some supporters of the theory claim that Jack faked his own death only to reappear as the German later on. Funny enough, Traven’s own widow revealed his identity after his death, but some conspiracy nuts still claim he was actually Jack London, while others claim he was actually Ambrose Bierce.

Sources #1, #2, #3, #4

Where I Write is a photogallery of science fiction and fantasy authors in their workspaces. The photo above is of Piers Anthony, author of the Xanth series. Photographer Kyle Cassidy plans to create a book filled with such images.

Link via io9

Honore de Balzac – Caffeine

There are some of us – myself included – who consider themselves addicted to caffeine. I get headaches if I don’t have a Diet Coke or coffee early enough in the day, and I definitely get cranky. But that’s nothing compared to Honore de Balzac. The famous French author would drink up to fifty cups of coffee every single day. And not stuff watered down with milk and sugar and the like – nope, Balzac liked thick, black, Turkish coffee. If it was unavailable in liquid form, or if he didn’t want to wait for it, he simply popped a handful of beans into his mouth and chewed (yuck). It may have kept him up all hours so he could write fantastic and prolific works of literature, but it didn’t do him any favors in the health department: he suffered from stomach cramps, high blood pressure and an enlarged heart. Some reports say it was the coffee that killed him – ulcers ate completely through his stomach and he died from a combination of that and caffeine poisoning. Others say it merely contributed to his already not-health-conscious lifestyle: in addition to the coffee, he ate vast quantities of food and had quite the waistline. Either way, he died at the early age of 51 on August 18, 1850.

Charles Dickens – Morgues

Charles Dickens could not get enough of body bags and toe tags. “I am dragged by invisible force to the morgue,” he even admitted. He loved to go down to the city morgue and would just hang out there for days on end, watching new dead bodies come in and observing the people there working on them. He referred to the whole ordeal as “the attraction of repulsion.” I feel like there’s a joke in here somewhere about not being caught dead in a morgue, but I’ll go ahead and leave that one alone. Dickens also liked to check out famous murder scenes and try to analyze exactly what happened. Maybe he was just ahead of his time? I’m thinking a new TV series might be in order – CSI: Charles Dickens. I’d totally watch that.

James Joyce – Farts

I’ve written about his addictions before, but I’m strangely fascinated with his fascination. Although they didn’t really diagnose sex addiction at the time, I bet if James Joyce was around today he would be classified as one. He wrote hundreds of letters to his lover, Nora (who later became his wife), and spared no expense in the detail of what he wanted the two of them to do when they were together again. But oddly, he seemed to be most obsessed with her farts. It’s a repeated theme in his letters – here’s one example: “I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women. It is a rather girlish noise not like the wet windy fart which I imagine fat wives have.”

Ummm. Yeah.

Vachel Lindsay – Germs and Cleanliness

Poet Vachel Lindsay grew up listening to his physician dad extol the virtues of avoiding germs and disease by staying clean. Unfortunately, toward the end of his life, the idea started to consume him entirely. He thought his wife was trying to kill him by sleeping with other men and then purposely spreading venereal disease to him, and believed germs were almost certainly the cause of his writer’s block. On December 5, 1931, Lindsay rearranged the furniture in the living room after his wife went to bed. He sat in the middle of all of his accolades – newspaper clippings, awards and certificates – and gulped down a mug of Lysol. He ran through the house screaming, “I got them before they got me! Let them try to explain this, if they can.”

It’s a relatively new theory in the world of psychology – in 2001, James Kaufman conducted a study that showed creative writers, especially female poets, are more susceptible to mental illness than other types of professions.

Being a female writer (not a poet, though), I was understandably interested in this theory. There really is a disproportionate amount of writers who have committed suicide over the years, so to brighten your day I thought I’d look at a few of them here.

Sylvia Plath

It makes sense to start with the theory’s namesake, I think. For those of you who haven’t read The Bell Jar, it’s a thinly disguised autobiography about one girl’s spiral into depression including suicide attempts, hospital stays and shock treatment therapy.

The bell jar is used as a metaphor for the feeling the main character has when she’s going through her depression – she feels like she’s trapped under a bell jar, stifled and numb. Sylvia predicted her own future when she wrote from the perspective of her protagonist – “How did I know that someday – at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere – the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?”

Despite marriage, children, a successful career as a poet and a promising one as a novelist, Sylvia’s own bell jar did descend again. On February 11, 1963, she killed herself by putting her head in the oven with the gas on. (Photo from A.J. Marik via Find a Grave)

Virginia Woolf

Poor Virginia Woolf seemed doomed from the start. She suffered a nervous breakdown when her mother died when Virginia was just 13. Her father died just nine years later, causing another breakdown which resulted in a brief period of institutionalization. She and her sister were subjected to sexual abuse by their half brothers, which certainly did not help her state of mind.

On March 28, 1941, Virginia decided she had had enough, loaded up her pockets with heavy rocks and walked into the River Ouse near her home. Judging by her symptoms and behavior, modern-day doctors think she probably suffered from bipolar disorder.

Sara Teasdale

Sara Teasdale was a talented poet, which, according to James Kaufman, put her at a serious disadvantage when it came to battling depression. In 1918, she won the Columbia University Poetry Society Prize, which was the precursor to the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Toward the end of the 1920s, though, things headed downhill for Sara. The Great Depression hit the same year she decided to divorce her husband.
Plagued by financial problems, her close friend and former suitor Vachel Lindsay killed himself by drinking Lysol in 1931. Vachel was a poet, so you could say his suicide contributes to Kaufman’s theory that creative writers are more susceptible to mental illness.
In 1933, Sara reunited with Vachel when she took an overdose of sleeping pills in her apartment in New York City, drew herself a warm bath and never got out of it. (Photo from quebecoise via Find a Grave)

Anne Sexton

Anne was never shy about admitting to her mental health problems and openly talked about her lifelong battle with bipolar disorder. She was somewhat of an instant success in her poetic career – after attending a workshop taught by poet John Holmes, she immediately had poems published in The New Yorker, Harper’s and the Saturday Review. By attending workshops and adopting a writing mentor, Anne became friends with poets such as Maxine Kumin, W.D. Snodgrass and none other than Sylvia Plath. She was such close friends with Sylvia, in fact, that she wrote a poem entitled Sylvia’s Death about, well, Sylvia’s death. She outlived Sylvia by 11 years, though – on October 4, 1974, Anne had lunch with Maxine, returned home and killed herself by sitting in her garage with the door down and the gas running.

Sarah Kane

Kaufman’s theory holds up even with contemporary writers. Sarah Kane was a playwright and screenwriter who suffered from severe depression. She was voluntarily admitted twice to the Maudsley psychiatric hospital in London. She channeled her depression into plays which were performed by the Royal Court. Critics weren’t too impressed when the plays debuted which may have lead to her suicide in 1999. After an overdose of prescription medication landed her in King’s College Hospital but failed to kill her, she ended up hanging herself in a hospital bathroom. (Photo from IainFisher.com)

So, that was morbid. But it does provide some supporting evidence for Kaufman’s Sylvia Plath effect. What do you think? Does the Sylvia Plath effect make sense? The other side of the coin is that there are a number of suicides with any occupation and these are just more public given the public nature of the work.

I’m not really sure which side I believe, but I am a little bit relieved to know I have no talent for poetry whatsoever.