101 Reasons to Stop Writing

1967: Dorothy Parker found out, the hard way, exactly what fresh hell this is. She is widely blamed for boosting Harlan Ellison’s career with an uncharacteristically positive review. This was back when people who made decisions actually read reviews.

1970: E.M. Forster gave his publisher the go-ahead to release his posthumous novel, Maurice. Forster was a closet homosexual, but people really should have figured it out after the publication of Howard’s End and A Passage to India.

1980: Henry Miller finally gave up waiting for American culture to catch up with him. When several of his novels were banned in the US for decades, Miller pioneered the ’smuggling’ distribution model. George Orwell said of him: “he is a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer”. Coming from George, that’s a compliment.