The Mammoth Book of Literary Anecdotes

"Who would write who had anything better to do?" queried Lord Byron rhetorically, and in this anthology, Philip Gooden finds hundreds of illuminating anecdotes about writers in support of this pithy remark. The stories tell us about the things writers got up to when not at their typewriters, from how Elizabethan playwright Ben Johnson escaped the gallows after having killed a man, to the first meeting between Anais Nin and Henry Miller.