Who the Hell is Pansy O'Hara? - Jenny Bond

[goodreads]

Title: Who the Hell is Pansy O'Hara?
Author: Jenny Bond
Genre: Essay, non-fiction
Rating: 3/5
# pages: 336
Date read: June, 2015

A work sure to captivate all lovers of language and literature, it reveals in short, pithy chapters, the lives, loves, motivations, and quirky, fascinating details involving fifty of the best-loved books of the Western world.
-- When stacked up, the original manuscript of Gone With the Wind stood taller than Margaret Mitchell, its 4' 9 1/2" author
-- Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, was part of the Allied team that cracked the Nazi's Enigma code
-- Leo Tolstoy's wife copied War and Peace by hand... seven times

From The Great Gatsby to Harper Lee, from Jaws to J.K. Rowling, "Who the Hell Is Pansy O'Hara?" offers an entertaining and informative journey through the minds of writers and the life experiences that took these amazing works from notion to novel.


50 short essays about the life of the authors up to and including the time where they wrote either their first book or their most popular book. I skipped the chapters about books and authors I knew and/or cared nothing about, but had fun reading the others. Probably not a book I'll reread, but it gave me a lot of interesting information.