A few literature facts

-Hemmingway died a paranoid schizophrenic who thought the cia was after him (he was right)

-Ernest Hemingway survived two plane crashes in two days—then wrote about it. He was presumed dead almost 24 hours later until he was spotted coming out of the jungle carrying bananas and a bottle of gin.

- Hemmingway once took home the urinal from his favourite bar arguing that he 'pissed away' so much of his money into it that he owned it.

-Patricia Highsmith (author of The Talented Mr. Ripley) kept snails as pets, and took 100 of them to a party in her handbag instead of a date. Pet snails appear in her 1957 novel Deep Water, and her story "The Snail Watcher" is about pet snails who kill their owner. 

-Franz Kafka asked for his work to be burned after his death—his friend ignored him.

-Agatha Christie vanished for 11 days—even the police couldn’t find her.

-A French writer, Michel Thaler, published a 233-page novel with ZERO verbs—just to prove they weren’t necessary.

-William Burroughs shot and killed his wife while playing “William Tell” with a gun... then became a literary icon.

-Victor Hugo’s publisher wouldn’t respond fast enough, so Hugo sent a telegram that just said “?”—they replied “!” to confirm great sales.

-Lord Byron kept a pet bear at university because the college banned dogs—but didn’t say anything about bears.

-Hunter S. Thompson once typed out the entirety of "The Great Gatsby" and "A Farewell to Arms" just to feel what it was like to write a great novel.

-Charles Dickens carried a navigational compass with him at all times—because he believed he had to sleep facing north for creativity.

-The book Gadsby (1939) is over 50,000 words and never uses the letter "E"—the most common letter in English.

- A poet once surgically removed a rib to send to his lover. Austrian poet Georg Trakl was deeply obsessed with his sister and wrote disturbing, incest-tinged poems before dying of cocaine overdose.

-Fernando Pessoa invented over 70 alter egos (“heteronyms”), each with their own biography, writing style, and astrological chart. He interviewed himself, criticized his own works, and made them fight in essays.

-A poet died laughing at his own joke. Greek Stoic Philitas of Cos supposedly starved to death trying to resolve a linguistic contradiction. Others say he just laughed himself to death.

-Guy de Maupassant believed he was being haunted by his own doppelgänger, who dictated short stories to him. He died in an asylum after trying to stab himself.