It’s said that most geniuses are borderline crazy. Herre are a few facts that might interest you.
- Mark Twain was born in 1835 in the year when Haley’s Comet could be seen from Earth, and fulfilling his own death prophecy, he died in 1910, the next time the comet cycled near the Earth, 76 years later.
- The Museum of Modern Art in New York City hung Henri Matisse’s painting Le Bateau upside down for 47 days before an alert art student noticed the error.
- Poet Ezra Pound wrote The Pisan Cantos while imprisoned in a U.S. army camp in Pisa, Italy. He had been arrested for treason because he had broadcasted Fascist propaganda from Italy during World War II. Eventually judged insane, Pound spent 12 years in a Washington D.C. mental hospital before finally returning to Italy.
- Novelist Edgar Allan Poe was once a student at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Poe flunked out in a particularly spectacular way. An order came for all cadets to show up for a full-dress parade “wearing white belt and gloves, under arms.” He followed the order all too literally, appearing wearing nothing but a belt and carrying his gloves under his naked arms.
- Robert Lewis Stevenson (1850-1894) wrote Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a book of 60,000 words, during a six-day cocaine binge. He was also reported to have been suffering from tuberculosis at the time.
- British writers Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis both died on November 22nd, 1963, the day of John Kennedy’s assassination.
- American author Norman Mailer once stabbed his wife and then wrote a novel about it called An American Dream.
- Both William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes, who was considered by some to be Shakespeare’s literary equivalent, died on the same day: April 23, 1616.
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