Comments on Gertrude Stein Could Take Them All

Beverly Cleary drank bat's blood with gunpowder every morning!

What, no Chuck Palahniuk????

Wasn't James Joyce the type of cantankerous little Irishman known for letting his mouth get him knocked off his barstool on a regular basis? I'm not sure that's tough though, that might just be alcoholism.

Typically though, writers are great champion's of bravado, they ultimately come from higher education and a somewhat privileged background. Even the toughest literary giant isn't much compared to the working everyman they usually romanticize about.

The dreadfully obvious omission here is none other than Henry Rollins. Not only is he a dreadfully prolific writer, he surely and irrevocably mangles, with his infamously muscled manos, any notion that may exist--or have ever existed--that hardcore = excellent.

Indeed, Henry Rollins, prolifically tattooed destroyer of forests, has, let's now admit, written little of lasting worth. But, dude, was he ever hardcore back in the day.

Thoreau was NOT hardcore. Keep in mind, most of those weeks spent at Walden Pond were really spent at Ralph Waldo Emerson's house.

i would choose the double homicide guy. am i right?

Jean Genet was born to a prostitute and an unknown father. At 15 he was sent to a Penal Colony for 3 years, then joined the Foreign Legion from which he was discharged as a homosexual, and spent years as a vagabond, petty thief and prostitute across Europe. After ten convictions he received a death sentence in 1949, which was only repealed because Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso petitioned the French government. All of his books were written while in prison.

Nelson Algren grew up on the South Side of Chicago, and wrote his first stories while working at a gas station. He got caught stealing a typewriter to write his first novel and got sent to jail for 6 months. A drug addict and small time crook, he later ran away with Simone DeBeauvoir to Latin America.

At 6 years old James Ellroy ("Demon Dog of American crime fiction") compulsively watched his prostitute mom having sex. He came home from school one day to find her murdered on the kitchen floor. He spent his adolescence researching her murder and his entire adult life writing about it.

Thoreau as an example of a hardcore writer? Piss off. This list is total bullshit.

Without a doubt: Samuel Beckett. One look at that hair says it all.

what about michel de montaigne?

and please thoreau was SO hardcore

unless you think that emo kids are hardcore

then yeah i can't argue with you