Top 5

Five authors with unhealthy obsessions over other authors

Mike Pollitt | Thursday 24 February, 2011 11:19

Every writer has their heroes. Sometimes the love they feel for their predecessors begets great feats of creativity as they strive to catch and overtake their idols. Other times, it just seems a bit odd. Here are five writers with borderline inappropriate feelings for the kid in the year above.

Hunter S Thompson and F Scott Fitzgerald
We all know Thompson was a bit of a mentalist, but there’s something especially weird about sitting in front of a typewriter copying out an entire book “just to get the feeling of what it was like to write that way.” That’s what he did to the Great Gatsby. Psycho.

David Mitchell and Vladimir Nabokov
“His combination of barbed intelligence and incandescent imagination is pretty humbling. And what a vocabulary! I used to read Nabokov with an X-ray on, trying to map the circuitry of what he was doing and how he was doing it. Lolita is an act of seduction.” Someone’s got quite the crush, haven’t they? Incidentally, if you like books and you don’t know about the Paris Review interview archive, then get over there immediately. It’s a goldmine.

Stephenie Meyer and Jane Austen
Of course she’s a proper author, don’t be such a snob. According to an uncited reference on Wikipedia, the first book in the Twilight series is avowedly emulous of Pride and Prejudice. More definitively, Meyer is on record saying she “can’t go through a year without re-reading Austen’s stuff”. In our book, re-reading anything without at least a five year interval counts as authorial stalking.

Ray Bradbury and Thomas Wolfe
Not Tom Wolfe the white-suited journo-novelist, but Thomas Wolfe the early 20th century American writer. Bradbury reputedly typed out Wolfe “to learn his rhythm” (what is it with this typing out fetish?), and even included his hero as a character in some of his stories. “When you’re nineteen, he opens the doors of the world for you”, he said. Which is sweet.

Pierre Menard and Miguel de Cervantes
The greatest obsessive of them all. Menard recreated Don Quixote in the original Spanish, line by line and word by word. He takes the typing out craziness of Hunter S Thompson and Ray Bradbury and runs with it. He’s an original, a genius, and completely made up. If you haven’t already, read this book.

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