That's a tough one. A number of my favorite writers had consistently miserable lives. Share an apartment with my surly mother, unhappily live in the closet, and desperately sell hackwork amidst the masterpieces at a penny a word just so I can eat? No thank you, Cornell Woolrich. Then there are the guys who were the slackers of their day. I'd love to have written "The Whisperer in the Darkness" and At the Mountains of Madness, but to share a house with my two aunts at age 40, live hand to mouth, and get divorced and never leave my hometown because I'm too racist and/or afraid to move to New York or Chicago with my wife? No thank YOU, H.P. Lovecraft. Drink myself stupid? Forget about it Jack Kerouac, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Edgar Allan Poe.
What about the normal everyday guys who wrote and lived lives relatively free from drama? Robert Cormer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Washington Irving (though he served as ambassador to Spain during Tyler's administration, and Spain was in upheaval at the time)? But I don't know enough about them to say a definite yea or nay.
In the end though, there's only one writer who I'd love to be. Mark Twain. Preferably not during one of the time periods where he was making idiotic investments. Also, it would be cool to hang out with Tesla.
As an addendum: as long as I can come back to life as myself, I want to know what happened on Ambrose Bierce's last day.
What about the normal everyday guys who wrote and lived lives relatively free from drama? Robert Cormer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Washington Irving (though he served as ambassador to Spain during Tyler's administration, and Spain was in upheaval at the time)? But I don't know enough about them to say a definite yea or nay.
In the end though, there's only one writer who I'd love to be. Mark Twain. Preferably not during one of the time periods where he was making idiotic investments. Also, it would be cool to hang out with Tesla.
As an addendum: as long as I can come back to life as myself, I want to know what happened on Ambrose Bierce's last day.
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