Authors who were clearly deranged lunatics

louis ferdinand celine.

L Ron Hubbard.

Dunno if he counts as 'deranged lunatic', but apparently V.S. Naipaul is one exceptionally nasty human being, if multiple accounts (including his biographer's) are to be believed.


"William Blake?"

English nature poet John Clare was confined to a lunatic asylum in his later life, from which he once escaped, but was later returned. He continued to write poems there for the remainder of his life, under the care of a humane asylum doctor.

I think dr seuss constitutes.


they don't make them lower than him.

Rand's pamphlets are beyond ridiculous.
She said the worst thing someone could do is laugh at yourself. She even described what she considered correct humor, like when a wealthy person steps on a banana.

Supposedly she insisted her followers smoke around her to symbolize man's victory over Nature by creating fire.


I read that William Godwin protested animal cruelty by slaughtering his neighbor's flock of sheep but I don't know if that is confirmed. That does sound loony.


William Blake supposedly recited the Adam and Eve scenes from Paradise Lost with his wife in the nude, but maybe that is just eccentric.

Calling at least several of the authors on that list 'deranged lunatics' is maybe stretching the boundaries of the term a bit. Tolstoi might better be described as a religious obsessive; Woolf and Hemingway both suffered from bouts of severe depression (that in both cases ended with their taking their own lives), but were quite lucid, functional and productive throughout much of their creative years, excepting some intervals. The same could be said of Plath. Poe was an alcoholic who likely suffered from depression and possibly other mental illness, but again was highly productive and rational enough to write a considerable body of work while struggling to keep the wolf from the door. P.K. Dick I confess to knowing little about as far as his mental state went, and I've read only a couple of his books; in the case of Swift, his 'madness' such as it was (it sounds closer to something resembling Alzheimer's, with violent manifestations), did not incapacitate him until much later in life, though some cite evidence of oncoming madness in some of his works, such as Gulliver's Travels.

Another writer who definitely suffered from mental illness (schizophrenia, to be precise) was Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of F. Scott. Under the shadow of her famous husband, her own writings--which show evidence of pretty considerable talent--were doomed to inattention during her life. Zelda's behaviors became increasingly erratic, culminating in confinement to an asylum for quite some time. Even after she was declared capable of living outside of an institution, she would still have to return for relapses of the illness. In fact, she was in confinement at the time of her death--during a fire at the mental hospital she was in, unable to escape and burning to death with several other patients trapped in a locked ward.

Hunter S. Thompson