The Book of the Bizarre: Freaky Facts and Strange Stories (41 page)

Ambrose Bierce was a prolific journalist and author whose biting cynicism earned him the nickname of Bitter Bierce. Perhaps the most interesting part of this literary dynamo's biography is his death—or, more
accurately, his disappearance. Nobody knows exactly how or when Bierce died.

In October of 1913, Bierce departed his native Washington, D.C., to tour old Civil War battlefields in the Deep South, a trip he had been planning for some time. He passed through Louisiana and Texas, and by December he was in Mexico, at which point he promptly disappeared. The Mexican Revolution was in full swing, and according to some theories, Bierce met up with rebel leader Pancho Villa, who later executed him. Others place him on the front lines of the war, killed in battle. Bierce's daughter, alarmed by her elderly father's disappearance, petitioned the U.S. government to send out a search party for him, but the group found no conclusive evidence about what happened to him.

TURGENEV VS. DOSTOYEVSKY

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818–1883) once called fellow Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) a “pimple on the face of literature.”

When writer, anthropologist, and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston died in 1960, she was buried in an unmarked grave in the Garden of Heavenly Rest in Fort Pierce, Florida—a cemetery designated for “Negros only.” In 1973, author Alice Walker found her grave and had a gravestone erected in Hurston's honor.

Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945) requested that upon her death her two dogs be removed from their graves in her garden and be buried with her. They were.

Poet Emily Dickinson's (1830–1886) final requests were that she would be buried in a white casket; that heliotropes be placed inside, along with a posy of blue violets placed at her throat; and that a wreath of blue violets be placed on top of the casket.

Carson McCullers (1917–1967) suffered a series of debilitating strokes when she was in her twenties, which caused her to lose sight in her right eye. This malady seriously affected her productivity—she had to reduce her writing output to one page a day.

PARKER VS. LUCE

Twentieth-century American writers Dorothy Parker and Clare Boothe Luce never got along. Once, when Luce encountered Parker in a doorway, she stepped aside and remarked, “Age before beauty.” Always quick with a comeback, Parker countered, “Pearls before swine,” as she elegantly passed through.

After meeting Lord Byron at a ball, Lady Caroline Lamb wrote in her diary that the English poet was “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” But that didn't prevent the married Lady Lamb from entering into a scandalous and well-publicized affair with him.

PREMATURE BURIAL