Starving Designer: Random Facts Dump Time

Fun Facts brought to you by Am I Annoying

Lillian Hellman - Playwright

June 20, 1905-June 30, 1984
Raised in New York City
Resided in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts
Wrote 'Julia,' 'The Little Foxes,' 'Toys in the Attic,' 'The Children's Hour,' 'Another Part of the Forest,' 'The Little Foxes,' 'The Dark Angel,' 'Days To Come' and 'Scoundrel Times'

She dropped out of Columbia University.
She was a chain smoker.
She divorced after a seven year marriage.
She had an affair with Dashiell Hammett for over thirty years.
She testified at Senator Joseph McCarthy's Un-American Activities Committee.
Mary McCarthy said: 'Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.''
She traveled with Ernest Hemingway.
She was an outspoken force in politics.
She went almost blind.
She said: 'Cynicism is an unpleasant way of saying the truth.'
She had strong opinions and often voiced them.

Susan Sontag - Author

January 16, 1933-December 28, 2004
Birth name was Susan Rosenblatt
Raised in Tucson, Arizona, and Los Angeles
Resided in Manhattan
Wrote 'Notes on Camp (1964),' 'Against Interpretation (1966),' 'On Photography (1977),' 'Illness as Metaphor (1978),' 'The Volcano Lover (1992)' and 'In America (2000)'
Wrote for 'The New Yorker,' 'The New York Review of Books,' 'Times Literary Supplement,' 'The Nation' and 'Partisan Review'
Partner of famed photographer Annie Leibovitz

She said: 'I don't like America enough to live anywhere except Manhattan.'
She was a literary critic who argued that literary criticism was pointless.
She sneered at writers she didn't like.
She said: 'The white race is the cancer of human history.'
The day after 9/11, she published a controversial essay calling the terrorists 'courageous.'
She had a weird skunk stripe in her hair.
She loved reading.
She was very involved in civil and human rights causes.
She was one of the most famous intellectuals of her time.
Her mother was a drunk.
Her father died when she was a little girl.
She graduated from high school at 15.
She suffered from breast cancer, uterine cancer and leukemia.
She pissed people off on both the right and the left.
he had as many fans as detractors.

Simone De Beauvoir - Philosopher

January 9, 1908-April 14, 1986
Wrote 'The Second Sex', 'All Men are Mortal,' 'The Mandarins,' 'Adieux: A Farewell to Jean-Paul Sartre'

She and her mother had a falling out when she became an atheist as a teenager.
'The Mandarins' was banned by the Catholic Church.
In 'The Second Sex,' she said 'A woman is not born, she is made,' thereby denying genetics and taking a rather extreme view on gender.
Towards the end of her life, she drank too much and took amphetamines.
She graduated from the Sorbonne.
At twenty-one, she met Jean-Paul Sartre, and they became life long friends and lovers.
She and Jean-Paul Sartre saw no need to marry and had two rules for their relationship: They were both allowed to fall in love with or have sex with anyone else they wanted, and they were always completely honest, never withholding anything from the other.
She and Jean-Paul Sartre had at least one menage a tois with Olga Kosakiewicz.
When Jean-Paul Sartre died, she said, 'My death will not bring us together again. This is how things are. It is in itself splendid that we were able to live our lives in harmony for so long.'
Her writing was far more lucid than Jean-Paul Sartre's.
She won the Prix Goncourt and the Jerusalem Prize for Leaders.
She rejected the title of existentialist.
'The Second Sex' is a landmark in the feminist philosophy.
She was a social reformer who fought for the rights of women, the elderly, and factory workers, in addition to protesting France's occupation of Algeria and the Vietnam War.

Elise Cowen - Poet

1933-February 1, 1962
Born in Long Island, New York
Poems include 'Words,' 'The Lady,' 'Emily,' 'A Skin' and 'Sitting'

She dated Allen Ginsberg and looked like him at the time.
After breaking up with him, she and her lover Shelia shared an apartment with Ginsberg and his lover Peter.
Ginsberg called her 'an intellectual madwoman.'
She stole books from libraries and bookstores, saying it was 'the only moral way' to acquire them.
She suffered depression and had several nervous breakdowns.
She checked herself out of Bellevue Hospital against her doctors' advice.
She committed suicide by jumping through a locked window in her parents' seventh-floor apartment.
After her death, her parents destroyed most of her writings.
Her favorite poets included T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Dylan Thomas, and she could recite their works from memory.
Beat chronicler Joyce Johnson said of her relation with Ginsberg, 'Elise was a moment in Allen's life. In Elise's life, Allen was an eternity.'
Her friend Leo Skir possessed 83 of her poems when she died and arranged for their publication.

Friday, June 4, 2010

Random Facts Dump Time

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