Famous Aspie Authors

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Regarding authors with Asperger Syndrome:
The only one I can be 100% certain is Temple Grandin, a researcher who is a published author of scientific research. I am not sure what Liane Holiday Wiley has published, but she is the one credited with coining the term "Aspie."
Apparently Wikipedia has a link to a site that has listed some famous authors who have demonstrated Aspie traits that have been documented.

I'm not sure if she was on the spectrum of Autism, but I have been diagnosed with Aspergers, and Jane Austen and me have a lot in common. Both of us are social recluses, (by choice), and both of us write with a style remenesent of the romantic era, with more similarities upon closer inspection.

What about Franz Kafka?

Writers Aut to be Famous topic

Franz Kafka, Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath(poet), J.D. Salinger.(':study:')


When I find more, if no one has posted, I will let you know.

I would take a strong guess at William Faulkner.

I suspect that Stephen King has AS. The reason for this is (other than to me, he displays a lot of the awkwardness and manner of speaking found in Aspies) that he has tried to write screenplays that just do not play well on TV and in movies. The dialogue comes off sounding funny. Also, when he directed that movie he did a while back about the killer machines (the title escapes me at the moment), it was reported that he avoided dealing with the actors directly as much as he could, focusing instead on directing the killer machines and the marauding semi trucks around in the final scenes. In his books, I began to notice that some of his characters have Aspie traits here and there, too.

Am I wrong?

[Preparing to duck the slings and arrows from those who accuse King of being a formula writer][Don't get all Highbrow Lit on me...]

Actually, if you were to read Slim: Memories of a Rich and Imperfect Life by Slim Keith, you might come to suspect Capote had AS. Slim was married to director Howard Hawks and then to Broadway mogul Leland Hayward and she was very good friends with Capote for a while. He destroyed their friendship when he based a character on her in his story Answered Prayers - a character that voiced gossip that she had told him in confidence. Basically he betrayed her trust, and he couldn't understand for the life of him why she was so upset.

The picture she draws of him in her book is not without some sympathy, and she depicts him as a misfit who dealt with his awkward appearance and social insecurity by becoming everyone's odd little "pet."

He seemed to have both obsessive qualities and that lacking empathy thing too - take In Cold Blood, where he became close to one of the killers and offered to help him - and did for quite a while - until his friendship with the killer had served his purpose. Then he pretty much forgot about him.

I saw the movie Capote and as an author, I was rather embarrassed to admit that I identified a lot with him, because I found some of the things he did (that I could see myself doing) not at all admirable.

Oh yeah, I know this thread is supposed to be about FAMOUS Aspie authors, but I still want to add myself to the list - I do have one book published by one of the large houses, plus one POD (just for fun). I'm not famous yet but I do intend to be. So yeah, me too.
-J.

Perhaps we should add George Lucas to the list then

It's also important to keep in mind that the man has snorted a lot of coke.

I would have to say Ayn Rand, especially after reading biographies of her. She definitely was not NT.

H. P. Lovecraft--Maybe??? I say DEFINITELY!
In fact, of all famous people suspected of being Aspies, Lovecraft is without a doubt the strongest candidate. He had all the tell-tale signs of Aspieness-especially when growing up.

Ok, I'm sure there is a thread for this already, BUT:

I listened to some audio clips of JRR Tolkien, speaking in English and speaking in Quenya (Elvish language). He sounds more fluent and confident in his made-up language than in English! That sold me on his having some AS traits.

Who has? Stephen King? That doesn't mean anything. There are many people with such skeletons in their closets, and some of them might be aspie.

Indeed, and I'm one of those people myself.

Steinbeck and Orwell? Really?

<I>1984</i> and <i>The Grapes of Wrath</a> are 2 of my favourite, and IMO the most amazingly and powerfully written novels of all time, but i don't really see anything obvious to connect either John or George to having AS.

Lovecraft - absolutely definitely. Not only does *everything* about his biography scream Aspie (just go look at his Wikipedia entry), every one of the protagonists in his stories fits the Aspie stereotype completely as well. I even think his facial expression in all the well-known photos of him looks like an autistic person's "neutral" facial expression.

Tolkien and Melville - both strong possibilities IMO. The whole obsessive attention to detail in Tolkien's work, making up whole languages, alphabets, calendars, genealogies spanning hundreds of generations... and i read that he "had to" invent a whole new theological concept of Elves sometimes being able to get reincarnated because he accidentally used the same name for a character as for one who had been killed previously, even though he could far more easily have just changed one of the names, because the names were that "sacred" to him - which sounds like an Aspie (or at least very OCD-ish) trait to me. Melville, again, the whole chapters devoted to classifying the different species of whales and other sea creatures, into categories based on size and appearance, and describing in vast amounts of detail particular features of the whale's anatomy or of the terms used for parts of the whaling ship makes <i>Moby Dick</I> into a very "Aspie-styled" novel. I've never read anything else by him, tho...

The one i'm wondering about at the moment is Thomas Hardy - i'm reading <I>Jude the Obscure</i>, and Jude, Sue and "Old Father Time" (the little kid) all seem to have extremely AS-like traits to me - of course, traits in characters don't necessarily indicate anything at all in the author, but the fact that he apparently based at least parts of the novel on his own family history, and he depicts such "queerness" or "peculiarity" of temperament and relationship problems as running in a family does kind of suggest it to me...

The one "alleged Aspie" author i really don't get is Jane Austen. I hated her books precisely because they seemed to be *totally* small-talk, gossip, mainstream-heterosexual relationships, and basically she seemed like pretty much the uber-NT author to me, writing completely about the stuff that Aspies have problems fitting into NT society precisely because we don't care about it...

About Austen not being Aspy, I'd have to agree. I just finished Sense and Sensibility and I have to say that a little Austen goes a long way. It's possible, but I think unlikely that an Aspy author would be able to portray such shallow and and passive characters whose lives revolve around gossip and finding eligible husbands. Or to be able to describe the social manipulations practiced by people of her class and time.

Melville, yes, I think so. I know one objection is the fact that he traveled a lot, but that does not mean he was not Aspy. One of my obsessions is travel/transportation and while I may have trouble walking across a room to meet someone I have no trouble traveling by myself across country if one of my obsessions is involved.