Post #4. (I’m just mentioning it because I always feel a bit slighted when my posts are missed and somebody else comes along with the same info later. I know you didn’t do it on purpose Otto, just sayin’)
No worries; I hate it when people miss my posts too.
That’s who I thought of. He was quite hurt when his “swans” (wealthy, lovely society NYC ladies), who felt betrayed, cut him off cold.
I think Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar made a lot of people unhappy after it was published. She insisted that it was only very loosely based on actual events in her life, but I think a lot of critics reviewed as it if it were autobiographical.
This was an ongoing plot point in the TV series “NCIS,” where one of the characters (Tim) wrote a successful novel with the characters blatantly based on his co-workers.
In real-life, it was done by Caroline Lockhart. She was one of the first female writers to have her stories published in a big east-coast U.S. newspaper with her real, female, name on the byline (Nellie Bly came first, I believe). Lockhart moved to Cody, Wyoming, where she wrote novels based directly on people she didn’t like. Her novels became bestsellers, and three of them were made into movies. “Lady Doc” was one example: Lockhart couldn’t get along with the female doctor in Cody, so she wrote a “fictional” book slamming the doctor and fueling a life-long feud.
I recently posted in Cafe Society the question of how the state of Hawaii reacted to Michener’s novel.
A poster or two responded that a lot of islanders were pretty pissed off. He did a lot of probing about in sensitive areas of family, money and land ownership, and wrote about what he found. Michener then lived in the state, but found his welcome worn out enough that he had to move back to the mainland, and that some folks to this day still don’t like to hear his name.
There was the recent case of Pierre Jourde and his novel Pays Perdu. Having written a thinly disguised unflattering fictional portrait of his ancestral village in the Auvergne:
Reactions were less extreme, but I understand that the inhabitants of Lübeck got angry when Thomas Mann published his (excellent) family saga Buddenbrooks, drawing on his own upbringing in the city.
The OP seems to equate basing characters on real people you know with writing a thinly disguised memoir. A great writer brings much more to a novel than a mere recounting of biographical incidents, but that doesn’t mean that good writing shouldn’t draw from life.
Incidentally, Capote was the model for one of the characters in To Kill a Mockingbird and didn’t seem to mind a bit. Harper Lee set the novel in a fictionalized version of her hometown and several of the characters are based directly on people she knew. TKAM is not usually considered hack work.
Mark Twain based much of Tom Sawyer on his own childhood and people he knew.
Blankenship became Huckleberry Finn, who reappeared in one of the greatest novels of the 19th century.
A cousin of Rebecca Wells told me that she was persona non grata among her family for Little Altars Everywhere, her first book and a much darker tale of mental illness, alcoholism, and child sexual abuse than any ya-ya sister could ever imagine. She redeemed herself and not coincidentally made a fortune by dressing up a lot of stories with prettiness and redemption in The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.
Come to think of it, Star Trek Voyager had an episode in which the EMH, who was an aspiring novelist, wrote a thinly-disguised account of life aboard ship that cast his shipmates in a pretty unflattering light. The EMH (a holographic “lifeform”) was puzzled when his shipmates were angry/hurt.
Novelist Gertrude Atherton included a scathing portrayal of the Algonquin Round Table in her book “The Black Oxen.” I’ve not found a source though that discusses what if any reaction the Round Tablers had to it.
Along the lines of the ST:V example, yonks ago a show called “Doctor Doctor” featured an episode in which one of the doctors in a small practice writes a novel using the other doctors as characters. Their reactions IIRC varied based on how flattering or unflattering the characters were. In the ST vein, there was that episode of Next Gen where Barkley created holodeck characters in the image of various of the crew, although not for purposes of producing a holo-novel.
Because on the TV shows I’m talking about, that’s exactly what the novels were.
Really? Who was it? curious
Wasn’t it Dill?
(dim memory from somewhere)
MiM
That’s it, but I don’t think she meant to roast him, as they were childhood friends.
How about J.K. Rowling and Gilderoy Lockhart? Apparently, Lockhart was based on a real person. (Unfortunately, she said, the actual individual probably thinks he inspired Dumbledore.)