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Real-life Authors As Characters

Heteronym

Heteronym

New Member
I'm trying to build a list of novels about real-life writers. So far I've come up with:

The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, José Saramago (Fernando Pessoa)
Immortality, Milan Kundera (Goethe)
The Master of St. Petersburg, J.M. Coetzee (Dostoevsky)
Lotte in Weimar, Thomas Mann (Goethe)
Casanova In Bolzano, Sándor Márai (Giacomo Casanova)
Henry and June, Anaïs Nin (Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin)
The Hours, Michael Cunningham (Virginia Woolf)

But I'd like some help in finding more titles. It interests me to see how writers today portray their predecessors. Recommend me any titles you know, so long as it involves real-life authors.
 
Edgar Allen Poe is a character in the Edgar Allan Poe Mysteries books by Harold Schechter. Poe solves crimes with the help of PT Barnum, Kit Carson, Davy Crockett, and others.
I haven't read these but you can find reviews online.
 
Very interesting topic! A couple of novels off the top of my head, where a real author play a more-or-less important part:

Mr and Mrs Dostoevsky are the protagonists in Leonid Tsypkin's Summer in Baden-Baden.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr has a cameo in Joseph Heller's Closing Time.

Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg fight Cthulhu in Nick Mamata's Move Under Ground. Really. I'm not making this up. And it's pretty damn good.

Arthur Conan Doyle in Julian Barnes' Arthur and George.

Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Darwin pop up in Jeanette Winterson's Lighthousekeeping.

William Shakespeare is everywhere, of course. Jasper Fforde's Something Rotten even has a whole army of cloned Shakespeares.

Then of course, there are some authors who like putting themselves as characters in their novels - not as protagonists, but as minor characters who are just as much a part of the story as anyone else; "that weird guy with the beard who writes all those books" or something similar. Kurt Vonnegut and Stephen King, for instance.
 
The Master, Colm Tóibín (Henry James)

And, forthcoming, Gaynor Arnold's Girl in a Blue Dress (Charles Dickens).
beer good said:
Then of course, there are some authors who like putting themselves as characters in their novels...
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Like Bret Easton Ellis in Lunar Park or Helen Garner in The Spare Room.

Then there's the disguised versions of authors in works, such as Bernard Malamud (E.I. Lonoff) in Philip Roth's Zuckerman Bound series.
 
I can't think of anything I've read right now, but a quick look around the bookshelf infront of me I saw a copy of Dante. I do believe there are writers lurking around in the Divine Comedy.

I'm loving this idea, its got me stuck thinking. I think I had better go peruse my other shelves for a better brainstorm...

EDIT: Oooo! Ooo! Oooo! Found another! Samuel Taylor Coleridge appears in Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. :D This is like a treasure hunt for me...
 
Then of course, there are some authors who like putting themselves as characters in their novels - not as protagonists, but as minor characters who are just as much a part of the story as anyone else; "that weird guy with the beard who writes all those books" or something similar. Kurt Vonnegut and Stephen King, for instance.
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Also, Paul Auster in his book New York Trilogy.
 
Charles Pellegrino appears in The Killing Star as Robert Tuna and in Dust as Richard "Tuna" Sinclair.
 
Anamnesis said:
Also, Paul Auster in his book New York Trilogy.
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True. Then again, Auster shows up either as himself or as a very thinly disguised self-insert in just about every single book he's ever written. We're talking about the guy who's written a novel in which the main character is locked up by characters from Paul Auster novels who've come to take revenge on their creator, after all. :cool:
 
Good thread indeed

John Keats is a charactere in Hyperion by Dan Simmons.
Also in Scifi lord Byron is in Anubis Gates by Tim Powers.
Leo tolstoy do a breif apparition in Winter soldier by Garry Kilworth(during the crimean wars).
Stendhal in the battle by Patrick Rambaud.
The first story in "house where i can't live any more" by Bohumil Hrabal is about Kafka,but more like a joke.
I know Rimbeau appears in quite a few books but i can't remenber them..i have a vague idea about borges too.
 
Interpretations of Borges appear in Umberto Eco's The Name Of The Rose and Mark Z. Danielewski's House Of Leaves.
 
Mark Twain and Cyrano de Bergerac both appear in the Riverworld series by Philip Jose Farmer.

There are several smaller historical figures in The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness by Caleb Carr.

All of Tim Powers' stuff. Check him out.
 
Mary Ann Mitchell turns the Marquis de Sade and his mother-in-law into vampires in a series of novels set in contemporary times. In a way I look forward to reading any more books that might be released, and another part of me screams at why I continue to read these books that kill my brain cells. :lol:
 
joderu95 said:
Mark Twain and Cyrano de Bergerac both appear in the Riverworld series by Philip Jose Farmer.
.
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How to put it to you smoothly,Joe.
Cyrano de Bergerac is a charactere of fiction,the book is not an autobiographie.As one of his worshipers as well as the owner of a large nasal apendice the news was very hard on me,a few year back.Nearly a bad as santa claus.
 
joderu95 said:
No it doesn't. Cyrano de Bergerac
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Yeah, but the Cyrano de Bergerac in fiction tend to be grotesques of him rather than be him himself. It's a fine line, I suppose, and we can stand on either side of it. From your own link: "the real Cyrano de Bergerac had little in common with the hero of the play bearing his name".
 
saliotthomas said:
How to put it to you smoothly,Joe.
Cyrano de Bergerac is a charactere of fiction,the book is not an autobiographie.As one of his worshipers as well as the owner of a large nasal apendice the news was very hard on me,a few year back.Nearly a bad as santa claus.
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:lol:You need to go back a bit further in your de Bergeracs thomas. It's funny you and Stewart both apparently were unaware of this man's existence. Who did you think the character in Rostand's play was based on?
 
Stewart said:
Yeah, but the Cyrano de Bergerac in fiction tend to be grotesques of him rather than be him himself. It's a fine line, I suppose, and we can stand on either side of it. From your own link: "the real Cyrano de Bergerac had little in common with the hero of the play bearing his name".
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The thing is Stewart why did those Cyrano de Bergeracs of fiction come about, ultimately? Was he somebody's original creation? A person actually existed with that name, was a writer of sorts and inspired others to adapt versions of himself in their own works.
 
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