One of the less laudable contributions to our culture has been, and unfortunately continues to be, the creation of absurd lists. Originally conceived as a means of entertaining audiences grown weary of standard humor, many of them now serve to simply mystify and/or confound. The following list originally appeared in the first or second or maybe even the third volume of the “Smart Aleck Chronicles” by Mike Robertson as published by Authorhouse.

FANTASY FACTS ABOUT FAMOUS WRITERS

1. Samuel Beckett wrote in the nude, which explains why the characters in his plays didn’t say much and didn’t do much.

2. T.S. Eliot liked to write his poems on graph paper.

3. Sylvia Plath often took more than a month to write a poem during which time it was rumored she could consume and dispense with as many as two dozen lovers.

4. Ernest Hemingway was afraid of squirrels.

5. Norman Mailer’s second and third wives were often required to paddle his bare buttocks with the latest edition of the New Yorker.

6. Stephen King claimed to have purchased a dental mirror once owned by Edgar Allan Poe at a garage sale in Boston.

7. Samuel Clemens was a confused serial adulterer who married women under his given name, his pen name, Mark Twain, and his postman’s name, Chester.

8. E.E. Cummings often wrote poems that he himself could not understand. He usually composed such poems after reciting parts of Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce in front of his cocker spaniel, Daedalus

9. The purpose of almost everything that Leo Tolstoy wrote was to impress a Russian showgirl named Leonard.

10. For decades after the Catcher in the Rye was published, J.D. Salenger wrote countless advertising slogans and jingles for Kellogg’s cereals. In fact, it is said that Salenger invented the name for the breakfast cereal Fruit Loops, after visiting his psychiatrist.