The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes

by John Gross (Editor)

The dictionary defines an anecdote as "a short account of an entertaining or interesting incident," and the anecdotes in this collection more than live up to that description. Many of them offer revealing insights into writers' personalities, their frailties and insecurities. Some of the
anecdotes are funny, often explosively so, while others are touching, sinister, or downright weird. They show writers in the English-speaking world from Chaucer to the present acting both unpredictably, and deeply in character.
The range is wide -- this is a book that finds room for anecdotes about Milton and Margaret Atwood, George Eliot and Salman Rushdie, Chinua Achebe and Bob Dylan, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Wittgenstein. The authors of the anecdotes are equally diverse, from the diarists John Aubrey, John Evelyn and
James Boswell to fellow writers such as W. H. Auden, Harriet Martineau, Walter Scott, Evelyn Waugh, and Vanessa Bell.

It is also a book in which you can find out which great historian's face was once mistaken for a baby's bottom, which film star left a haunting account of Virginia Woolf not long before her death, and what Agatha Christie really thought of Hercule Poirot. The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes
is a book not just for lovers of literature, but for anyone with a taste for the curiosities of human nature.

Genres: Nonfiction, Reference, Books About Books, Biography

400 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2006

About the author

John Gross was the editor of The Times Literary Supplement in London, a senior book editor and book critic on the staff of The New York Times in New York, and theatre critic for The Sunday Telegraph. He was also literary editor of The New Statesman and Spectator magazines.

Reviews

[meeners · Rating 4 out of 5]

for the past few weeks i have been dipping into this every night before going to bed. i love literary anecdotes - they're pithy, witty, often outrageous, sometimes an outright lie. but that's ok - it doesn't have to be factual for it to be true! there's a beautifully apt quote about this in this volume, by victoria glendinning: "Apocryphal stories have a poetic if not a historical truth; they express what a sufficient number of people feel to have been the truth."

i wish i could type out scads of pages from this book but i'll confine myself to just three:

1. anecdote about thomas hobbes, and his accidental love of geometry: He was 40 years old before he looked in on Geometry; which happened accidentally. Being in a Gentleman's Library, Euclid's Elements lay open, and 'twas the 47 El. libri I. He read the Proposition. By God, sayd he (he would now and then swear an emphaticall Oath by way of emphasis) this is impossible! So he reads the Demonstration of it, which referred him back to such a Proposition; which proposition he read. That referred him back to another, which he also read. Et sic deinceps that at last he was demonstratively convinced of that trueth. This made him in love with Geometry. (quote taken from original text, not the quoted and revised version found in this book)

2. on the opposite end of the spectrum, an anecdote about writers behaving badly (algernon charles swinburne): Mr Arthur Severn has related how on one occasion Swinburne was leaving a club and looked for his hat in the hall. He only found four tall top-hats belonging to other members of the club. He tried on the hats one after another, and as they did not fit his large head, threw them, in turn, on the floor. When the hall porter, hearing a noise, appeared, he found Swinburne executing a war dance on the hats. The infuriated poet went for the hall porter, demanding, with that sanguinary power of invective which was his particular gift, where his hat was. The man replied that he believed Mr Swinburne had no hat when he entered the club that evening.

[note to self: learn how to cultivate a sanguinary power of invective!]

3. an anecdote about poe, for the academics in us all: It was extremely ironic that the author of the article on "Whirlpool" in the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica gave Poe credit for information that Poe had lifted from an earlier edition of the same Encyclopedia [for his story "A Descent into the Maelstrom"], and then quoted as facts the parts of the story that Poe himself had invented.

[Adam McPhee · Rating 1 out of 5]

Browsing through this really made me hate the English. Sometimes I feel like I'm too harsh on them, but this book completely reified all my current prejudices. I mean, this is what they choose to celebrate. Thoroughly disgusting nation.

If there's one saving grace, it's that I found my irritation rising as I browsed through the book, which I read the book backwards, as I'm familiar with 20th/21st century literature than the 18th/17th century literature and the book is written in chronological order, so it may be that the English are slowly becoming less detestable over time.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert Herrick teaching his pet pig to drink from a tankard - a treat!

[Heather Ingemar · Rating 2 out of 5]

Scanning through this book made it seem really cool, but it just doesn't have enough substance for me to sit down and read it.

[Melanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just plain fun.

[Sharen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Always fun to read anecdotes about authors...and others!