In December 1924, a postal inspector from Corinth, Miss., leveled a series of charges against the postmaster at the University of Mississippi. “You mistreat mail of all classes,” he wrote, “including registered mail; … you have thrown mail with return postage guaranteed and all other classes into the garbage can by the side entrance,” and “some patrons have gone to this garbage can to get their magazines.”

The slothful postmaster was William Faulkner. He had accepted the position in 1921 while trying to establish himself as a writer, but he spent most of his time in the back of the office, as far as possible from the service windows, in what he called the “reading room.” When he wasn’t reading or writing there he was playing bridge with friends; he would rise grumpily only when a patron rapped on the glass with a coin.

It was a brief career. Shortly after the inspector’s complaint, Faulkner wrote to the postmaster general: “As long as I live under the capitalistic system, I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.”

Beset with writer’s block, Robert Benchley typed the word The, thinking it “as safe a start as any.”

Then he left for an hour with friends.

On returning to his room he regarded the solitary word, alone on its expanse of blank paper.

He typed hell with it and “went out happily for the evening.”

Anthony Burgess wrote his Enderby novels under the pen name Joseph Kell. So he was amused when in 1963 the Yorkshire Post asked him to review one of them.

Sensing a practical joke by one of the editors, he submitted a scathing review. “This is in many ways a dirty book,” he wrote. “It may well make some people sick, and those of my readers with tender stomachs are advised to let it alone.”

Alas, the assignment wasn’t a joke. The newspaper published Burgess’ review — and when it discovered his double identity, “I was attacked by the editor of the Yorkshire Post on Yorkshire Television and promptly, and perhaps justly, dismissed.”

See Conflict of Interest.

Art critic Philip Gilbert Hamerton’s wife found herself sitting next to Alfred, Lord Tennyson one day at a Paris lunch. He told her this story — she records it in her 1896 memoir:

I had occasion to go to Paris with a friend who was supposed to speak French creditably, and who fancied himself a master of it. On the morning following our arrival in the French capital, being somewhat knocked up by the journey, we had a late breakfast at a small side-table of the dining-room, of which we were soon the only occupants, under the watchful and, as I thought, suspicious eyes of a waiter, whose attention had probably been attracted by the conspicuous difference between our stature and garb from that of his little dandified countrymen.

Having caught a slight cold on the passage, I felt more inclined to stay by the fire with a newspaper than to go out, and did so, whilst my friend, who had some business in the town, left me for some time. As I drew my chair up to the hearth I heard the waiter answering with alacrity to some recommendation of my friend’s, ‘Oh, monsieur peut être tranquille, j’y veillerai.’ I thought it was some order about our dinner, and resumed my political studies.

Was it my cold which made me dull and inattentive? It is quite possible, for my eyes kept wandering from my paper, and, strange to say, always met those of the French waiter riveted upon me. At first I felt annoyed: what could be so strange about my person? Then I was irritated, for though that queer little man was making some pretence at dusting or replacing chairs, still his eyes never left me for a moment, and at last, being somewhat drowsy, I had the sensation that one experiences in a nightmare, and thought I had better resort to my room and make up for a shortened night.

No sooner, however, had I got up from my chair than the waiter was entreating me to remain, offering to heap coals on the fire, to bring me another paper or a pillow if I was tired, and ‘Did I wish to write a letter? he would fetch instantly what was required; or should I like something hot for my cold?’ His voice had the strange coaxing tone that we use to pacify children, and made me stare; but I answered angrily that I only wanted a nap, and to be let alone, and I made for the door in spite of his objurgations.

Then he ran in front of me, and barring the door with arms outstretched, besought me to await my friend. This unaccountable behavior had rendered me furious, and now I was determined to force my way out, despite the mad resistance and loud gibberish of the waiter, and I began to use my fists.

It was in the midst of this tremendous row that my astonished friend re-appeared in the dining-room, and was greeted with this exclamation from my adversary: ‘Ah, monsieur, vous voyez, j’ai tenu ma parole: je ne l’ai pas laissé sortir le fou; mais ça n’a pas été sans peine, il était temps que vous arriviez.’

It turned out that my friend, anxious for my comfort and noticing that the fire was getting low, had said in his easy French before leaving, ‘Garçon, surtout ne laissez pas sortir le fou’ (feu) — meaning ‘Don’t let the fire go out,’ and the intelligent foreigner had immediately guessed from my appearance that I was le fou.’

Tennyson offered this as one of a number of anecdotes about him that were current at the time; when she asked whether it were true, he smiled and said, “I think it is capital; you will have to guess.”

Horace Greeley had atrocious handwriting. According to William Shepard Walsh’s Handy-Book of Literary Curiosities (1892), Greeley once sent the following note to the Iowa Press Association:

“I have waited till longer waiting would be discourteous, only to find that I cannot attend your Press meeting next June as I would like to do. I find so many cares and duties pressing on me that, with the weight of years, I feel obliged to decline any invitation that takes me away a day’s journey from home.”

After some study, the Iowans deciphered this as:

“I have wondered all along whether any squirt had denied the scandal about the President meeting Jane in the woods on Saturday. I have hominy, carrots, and R.R. ties more than I could move with eight steers. If eels are blighted, dig them early. Any insinuation that brick ovens are dangerous to hams gives me the horrors.”

Their reply is not recorded.

About 50 years after Shakespeare’s death, John Dryden’s brother-in-law James Howard rewrote Romeo and Juliet as a tragicomedy in which the lovers are happily married. His production was so unpopular that the play was performed as a tragedy on alternate evenings, but it was enough to inspire a series of dramatists to try their hands at revising the Bard.

British poet laureate William Davenant added dancing and singing to Macbeth, all reportedly “excellently performed, being in the nature of an opera.” In Irish poet Nahum Tate’s 1681 revision of King Lear, the fool is absent, the king survives, Cordelia marries Edgar, and the three sisters are reconciled. In the 1740s, David Garrick raised Juliet’s age to 18, dropped the bedroom scene, removed Rosaline, and added a brief reunion between the lovers in the tomb. (He considered these changes “few and trifling.”)

The one really interesting such idea lay with Lewis Carroll, who dreamed of “Bowldlerising Bowldler,” “i.e. of editing a Shakespeare which shall be absolutely fit for girls.” He planned to “erase ruthlessly every word in the play that is in any degree profane, or coarse, or in any sense unsuited for a girl of from 10 to 15; and then to make the best I can of what is left.” Alas, he never completed the project.