Respected Writers Who Were Actually Terrible People 

Which of these writers shocked you with their antics?

Sounds more like Hemingway was trolling the KGB, wasting their time and giving them nothing.

In México we actually eat grasshoppers, so it makes perfect sense that Roald would write that and there's no need to take it as something offensive.

Honestly I don’t think hunter s thompson was living in the same reality as the rest of us.

Jack Nicholson being scared of another human being is weird since he plays the crazy scary one

It can be argued that good writers have one thing in common: they hate humanity.

“Roald Dahl, author of James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, and The BFG” forgetting something?

Jack London, was not racist. Many of London's short stories are noted for their empathetic portrayal of Mexican, Asian, and Hawaiian characters. In her Russo-Japanese War correspondence, as well as her unfinished novel "Cherry", she shows great admiration for Japanese customs and capabilities.

It’s a good thing I never actually treat an artist’s work as being them literally. I don’t idolize an artist because of their work. I prefer to like the works, not the person. Example, I prefer to like pieces of music, not idolize the people making it.

I hate that I clicked this

“Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it's done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves.”

Can’t write jokes - reference rick and morty

OK. Orwell is a bad guy for outing Soviets and Hemingway is another bad guy for working for them. This is a $hit video.

Actually Dahl has been proven strict and many angry problems after the war and I look at ever interview of Dahl and he was not at all racist he got annoyed in the interview you allowed though cause the reporter kept interrupting him Edit: all the stuff he said was written by just random people

Lmao, I don't think Hunter S. Thompson ever claimed to be a good guy.

I think it is very important to distinguish the artist from their art. For example, H.P. Lovecraft was apparently a racist, homophobic xenophobe (and unlike a certain subset of people I am using those terms in their *ORIGINAL* definition) but Call of Cthulhu is still one of my personal favorite books to read every Halloween despite the fact that as a black bisexual woman he probably would not have liked me very much. Just because an artist harbors an opinion you personally disagree with or has done something questionable does not mean their work is automatically shit.

I wonder when they will start accusing Willaim Shakespear and Charles Dickens for The Merchant of Venice and Christmas Carol, respectively?

I’m not surprised about Salinger. Catcher In The Rye has a ton of predatory undertones, from both perspectives. Clearly it was on his mind.

With great artistic talent also comes a lot of demons and mental instability, we can commend them for their works and also accept for the completely complicated and flawed individuals that they are. We can praise their work while condemning their behavior.

I think you should add Harlan Ellison to this list. I met him one time and he walked into a room full of people and insulted my appearance forr no reason at all.

Orwell calling out commies does not make him bad in my book.

"The arrogance of the present", is what I call it, judging the past with current social mores is completely idiotic. Wait 50 years and see what they think of you then.

>having a political viewpoint that differs from mine makes you a monster.

I think you're a bit hard on Jack London. If he was racist it was not central to his work. He had a very ruff childhood and died at the age of 40 and he also abused women. What most people hold against him is that he was a revolutionary socialist. I think he is underrated as a writer and have always found his work informative and rewarding.

Dr Seuss cheated on his wife while she was suffering from cancer for 13 years. She ended up committing suicide, then he married his mistress.

Hemingway is a terrible person because he was a low level spy for the KGB? Just because you join a horrible group doesn't mean you're a horrible person. Want proof: the actor who played Goldfinger, he was a party member but protected some Jewish people, Schienlier anyone, and Reinhard Heinrich's brother made false passports to help those considered "inferior" to escape. All these men join a horrible organization but had no intent to do harm. As I said, Ernest was low level, probably because he didn't want to kill anyone.

Orwell is a goddamn hero.

Roald Dahl (aka Saki) was married to actress Patricia Neal when she had her devastating stroke. In ‘support’ of her, he bullied her terribly about her physical therapy. She credited. him with amazing recovery - and divorced him.

This is just making my Life more Depressing.

Gotta say, the example from White Fang isn't racist. It's recognition of how horribly the native tribes in Alaska lived under White rule. It's exactly how things would have looked to an outside observer at the time. London might have been a racist, but this example is complete misinterpretation.

I live in the neighborhood where Hunter S. Thompson grew up, and people here sometimes get chills down their spine when you speak his name. Though some tales of his teen misdeeds are false, there is no question he was violent and abusive.

Who shocked me the most? All of them.. How can geniuses be so ignorant?

Surprised Lovecraft (although I do admire his work) didn’t make this list.

William S Burroughs was living in Lawrence, KS when my mom was going to school there. She met him a two different occasions, she said he was a really mean guy. He was terrible to the staff at the restaurant she worked at and was terrible to the people at the hospital she was working at.

This is sheer biased nonsense. Not convincing at all...

Jack London was self-described amoral. When his first wife got mad at him for going out at nights and philandering, he told her that morality is just a sign of low blood pressure.

Just BECAUSE some PEOPLE are very talented that DOESN'T mean they are Nice ,RESPECTFUL PEOPLE.

Was really expecting to see Lovecraft in this video.

In the case of George Orwell, I think what he did was more out of his experience with the Communist Party. He himself was never a Communist and seemed to dislike the direction where they were going. He was definitely anti-fascist but also against totalitarianism in general and his experiences while he was fighting in Spain with the anarchist POUM defined his experiences and in the war which he wrote about in his book Homage to Catalonia and at one point he and his people were accused by the Soviets (who dominated the Republican side of the war) of being Trotsky followers and they found themselves hunted by the police. With all that in mind he definitely did not trust anyone who was Communist and he might have suspected them of being agents for the Soviet Union, which is not entirely unfounded since many considered that Moscow controlled the Communist Party outside of the Soviet Union. Personally I think he had a different view that most people had and his becoming an informer was more due to his experiences rather than the desire to betray for his own safety. Reading any of his famous books like Animal Farm will more or less answer the reasons for his anti-Communist feelings which actually were different than someone from a Right wing perspective. I suppose you might say he betrayed the ones he thought were betrayers.

I live in Hunter S. Thompson’s hometown, just a couple if blocks from his childhood home, in fact. People here shudder when they hear his name. He robbed a store at gunpoint and burglarized others (he admitted all this) and was accused of beating up a child in a park. He was never a decent or accountable person.

Let's not forget that H.P. Lovecraft was a heavy supporter of eugenics

I'm always wary of these kinds of videos, because they're highly sensational and don't paint a very full picture. I strongly recommend taking this with a grain of salt.

I've never read White Fang, and I had no idea it was written from the dog's POV. I'll have to pick that up. Thanks Grunge.

Oooooooooo! What buggers! Fascinating & great narratives! Bravo!

I'm surprised dr. Seuss isn't on the list

Orwell referenced Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We" in the writing of "1984", though not as heavily as Ayn Rand did with "Anthem." With that said, I did enjoy his nonfiction works "Such, Such Were the Joys" ,"The Road to Wigan Pier" and "Down and Out in Paris and London."

Your representations of London & Dhal are silly & likely out of context, and heresay to boot for most of them.

Thanks for making this video 🙃

As a retired teacher it horrifies me to learn Roald Dahl was such a creep!

Millennial history especially with regard to Orwell.

Some of these examples are a little overstated for example if someone like orwell is against a particular ideology why does pointing out people who may hold that ideology make you a jerk?

Oh my ! this is soooooo interesting!

Hunter S Thompson staged human hunting parties on his farm. He made snuff films of these hunts, and sold them for big money. What a creep, and he got away with this.

Some of these seemed exaggerated, for example I found funny the part of the grasshopper, as a Mexican I admit, some of us eat grasshoppers and we don't feel offended if someone says that

I have no problem with what Eric Blair (George Orwell) did.

It looks like Jack London understood the Chinese before the rest of us. Racism is always truth.

The greatest crime in the 21st century is to offend

Goddamn, I bet Jack Nicholson could tell some amazing stories about so many people. Too bad he hasn't written an autobiography or something

what's wrong with openly speaking about your hate for autocratic states?

grunge is another form of brain washing we all fucked up but lived and got taken out of context

“I’d rather be fried alive and eaten by Mexicans” is actually in reference to something people in Mexico actually do. They eat fried grasshoppers and crickets. How is that even a racist thing for the grasshopper to say?

Wrong. George Orwell did not sell out other writers. The lists he had were private and were used to guess which writers were Communists/Fascists. He DID NOT SELL OUT FELLOW WRITERS. Interestingly it turned out he was right about the writers in most cases.

Hemingway was a "typical man" of his time when it came to his treatment of women and tastes, he hated the American state, he practically lived in Cuba, some of his books were awful and it's not a secrete he was an alcoholic or drank too much. I'm sorry to say that Salinger's behaviour with girls was not that different in comparison to some of his peers, to some pockets of his society, not just men, 14 yo girls were considered "fair game" in dating

Who ISNT accused of being racist back then and now. It’s outa control

If I met Bill Murray...the chair is right there and the pool there. Let’s do comedy a favor

Roald Dahl was Norwegian. His name was actually pronounced "roo-al"

this is total bollocks!

I enjoyed the interlude with the Dalek. Should have sent a Dalek to some of these authors for a visit.

They criticised Orwell for ‘grassing’ on Communists, then immediately complained that Hemingway joined a Communist organisation. Strange.

Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye", what little I read of it, seemed like a mediocre version of Dostoevkiy's "Notes from Underground" which preceded it by about 87 years. So no love lost there...

How could you manage to get so much so wrong?

Someone needs to renew their library card and try again. Too many inaccuracies in this to count.

Honorable mention: Lewis Carrol, author of "Alice In Wonderland"..his hobby was photographing pre-pubesent young girls.

What orwell did doesn't sound terrible at all.

It’s quite fitting that Salinger was bad person, since his most popular book was pretty bad too.

Amazing bro...

So Stephen King, R.L. Stein, and Robert Frost are still cool?

Was this list made by a TWITTER user?

A woke fifth columner we got here

They didn't mention that Hemingway's daughters said that they were molested by him. It lead to one of his daughters committing suicide later in life.

Dahl said no such thing, but he right pissed you off, still is... 🤣

1984 and animal farm are actually some of the most entertaining books ive ever read. I would recommend them to anyone looking for a good read.

So Orwell was also a hero? Good to know!

Thompson may have been a terrible person, but his "in a democracy, you have to be a player" line is based...

I don't know about this. People are not, usually, either angels or awful, and my guess is that most of the writers identified here had some good in them, too. Just like all of us.

Don’t think Hunter S Thompson was a jerk, so much as mentally unstable. I found him kinda likable, but crazy

Eric Cartman would have LOVED Roald Dahl

I don’t know why I like these shows. My uncle is Richard Gehman who left his wife Estelle Getty for my aunt. They met at 18, had a love affair and then met 20 years later. He was bffs with Fitzgerald who would come to my dads home. Drunks. Richard died of complications from alcoholism.

Some of the best painters, authors, singers, sculptors, doctors, lawyers, Kings and Presidents were, privately, really awful humans. But some people want to forget about their art, their music, the lives they've saved and improved, the nations they built and the contributions they've made to society and focus instead on trivial bullshit.

Hunter S. Thompson is great only in the eyes of his fan club 🙄

Wait on: Orwell worked for the Ministry of Propaganda BEFORE he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. So he would have based it on his experiences there. And in Nineteen Eighty-Four (spoiler alert) Winston breaks down and betrays his comrade. If anything, the book is a mea culpa for what he did during the war.

Geroge Orwell is not his real name, it's Eric Blair

Some? More like most. If you wanted to avoid creative works by awful people your bookshelf, music and movie collection would be empty.

The fact that we now demand our artists to follow orthodoxy and be "good" people is why there are so few great (known) artists today.

Ronald Dahl was actually named after my great grandma's uncle Roald Amundsen the famous explorer. Uncle Roald was NOT an asshole though, he was an adventurous, loving man. He passed down many traits on my Dads side.

Well you should have added Jean Jack Rousseau and his hypocrisy about raising children in Emile when he just sent his children into an orphanage

Anybody who thinks writers 'live in their heads' and don't know the world and people is no writer.

okay so the ompa lompas were pygmies that in and of itself isn't racist, I'm​ not saying rald dahl was or wasn't racist

Anyone else notice that there were no women on this list?

The great thing about You Tube is that anyone with a computer, internet, and editing software can say whatever they like. The worst thing about You Tube is that anyone with a computer, internet, and editing software can say whatever they like.