↓ that ‘novelists’ in this context refers specifically to novelists who have written in English, with the notable exception of W.G. Sebald, who lived most of his life in England but wrote in German

↓ that Lives of the Novelists traces the origins of the English novel to the work of John Bunyan, Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, and Samuel Richardson; that its 287 biographical essays, which vary in length from one to six pages, are arranged chronologically and cover the history of the novel up to the present day

↓ that it does not limit itself to canonical authors but makes a point of including writers of genre fiction, popular novelists, children’s authors, and a representative sample of out-and-out hacks

↓ that Ray Bradbury’s wife had twenty-two cats

↓ that Sutherland, who is a scholar of nineteenth-century literature, a regularcontributor to the Guardian, and a former Man Booker Prize judge, is not only an extraordinarily knowledgeable critic, but a cheerful and wittily irreverent writer who never lets the mundane business of literary criticism stand in the way of a sensational or amusing anecdote

↓ that Lives of the Novelists is, as a result, enormous fun to read

↓ that Mickey Spillane, who played his own hard-boiled hero Mike Hammer in the film version of his novel The Girl Hunters (1963), claimed there were no characters in his novels who had moustaches or drank cognac because he did not know how to spell ‘moustache’ or ‘cognac’

↓ that the trilby hat is named after the eponymous character in George du Maurier’s novel Trilby (1894), but that at no stage in the novel does the character actually wear a trilby

↓ that John Cleland, author of the first pornographic novel in English, was proud of the fact that he wrote Fanny Hill (1748–49) without using any rude words

↓ that Cleland wrote several other works of a non-pornographic nature, which ‘neither offended, nor amused, nor sold’

↓ that 287 is an arbitrary number and Lives of the Novelists is not comprehensive

↓ that Sutherland has omitted many well-known novelists, including Tobias Smollet, C.S. Lewis, Enid Blyton, Jack Kerouac, and Thomas Pynchon, and has written essays on many obscure novelists, including Warwick Deeping, Ella Hepworth Dixon, Hall Caine, and Lewis Wingfield

↓ that his accounts of individual writers are not approached in a consistent manner but discuss whatever aspect of a writer’s life and work he finds most interesting

↓ that these idiosyncrasies are not necessarily flaws, because one of the volume’s intentions is to convey the richness of the novel’s cultural history

↓ that a sequence of short biographical essays is an effective way to suggest something of the novel’s evolution as a cultural phenomenon, its great diversity of subject matter, and its ability to adapt and respond to changing historical circumstances; that, despite its high cultural aspirations, the modern novel came into being and has continued to flourish primarily as a populist art form

↓ that a sequence of short biographical essays is less effective as a means of accounting for the expressive qualities and the stylistic development of the novel

↓ that Raymond Chandler once had a job stringing tennis racquets; that Julian Barnes worked for the Oxford English Dictionary, specialising in the etymologies of words from C–G; that John Barth and Donald Barthelme both wanted to be jazz drummers; that Edgar Rice Burroughs turned to fiction writing because his career as a door-to-door pencil sharpener salesman was going nowhere

↓ that Louis L’Amour claimed to have been a cattle-skinner, a hay-cutter, a circus elephant handler, a lumberjack, a professional prize-fighter, a hobo, a sailor, and to have ridden with a posse of Tibetan bandits

↓ that writing a novel can be a good career move; that the most popular novelists can become staggeringly wealthy; that Catherine Cookson has sold more than 100 million books and L’Amour has sold 200 million; that Michael Crichton had an income in the vicinity of $60 million per annum

↓ that most novelists are somewhat less successful in monetary terms

↓ that the publisher Simon & Schuster rejected John Kennedy Toole’s hilarious and brilliant satire A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), claiming that ‘it isn’t really about anything’

↓ that novel writing need not be a tortuous business; that the pulp detective fiction writer Michael Avallone, who published more than one thousand books in his lifetime, boasted that he once wrote a novel in thirty-six hours

↓ that the novel in question turned out to be not very good

↓ that novelists are very often alcoholics; that without alcoholics the modern American novel, in particular, would be almost non-existent

↓ that Malcolm Lowry’s alcoholism was so severe that he once drank a bottle of olive oil under the mistaken impression that it was hair tonic; that Stephen King claims he was consuming so much booze and cocaine in the early part of his career that he cannot remember writing Cujo (1981); that at one stage of her life Muriel Spark was taking such large quantities of pep-pills that she became ‘as much a junkie as Bill Burroughs’ and came to believe that T.S. Eliot was sending her coded messages in his plays

↓ that Eliot was not sending her messages

↓ that the work of novelists often draws on their personal experiences and fictional characters are often based on real people (who are not always happy about it)

↓ that novels are full of outrageous lies and novelists are prone to telling outrageous lies about themselves; that if liars were cricketers Harold Robbins would be Donald Bradman

↓ that The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789), a book professing to be the memoir of an African prince sold into slavery, became a runaway bestseller and helped to bolster the abolitionist movement; that most of it was wasn’t actually true

↓ that determining the precise autobiographical content of a novel is an impossible task, except in the case of Charles Bukowski, who declared that his fiction is ninety-three per cent autobiographical; that the problem is, if anything, made worse by a novel that is explicitly presented as a roman-à-clef

↓ that during World War I, while living in Cornwall, D.H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, were accused of sending semaphore messages to German U-Boats using their underwear; that when Katherine Mansfield was dying of consumption Lawrence sent her a card that read ‘you are a loathsome reptile I hope you will die’

↓ that many novelists are not nice people; that many of them hold bizarre or deeply unpleasant opinions; that being a crackpot is no barrier to success; that William L. Pierce’s foul neo-Nazi propaganda novel The Turner Diaries (1978), which was greatly admired by the Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh, has sold more than half a million copies

↓ that Michael Avallone hated Stephen King; that Georgette Heyer hated Barbara Cartland; that Raymond Chandler hated James M. Cain; that V.S. Naipaul hates just about everybody, and if they awarded a Nobel Prize for rudeness he ‘would win outright’; that everyone hated John O’Hara

↓ that a stammer is a physiological condition and is not the same as a stutter; that Elizabeth Bowen suffered from the former, not the latter

↓ that Bowen’s condition was in no way related to Virginia Woolf calling her ‘horseface’

↓ that Woolf was almost certainly molested by her stepbrother as a child; that Patricia Highsmith was probably also a victim of childhood abuse

↓ that Nathaniel Hawthorne may well have had an incestuous relationship with his sister; that Henry Fielding was accused of committing incest with his sister, but no one knows for sure

↓ that Laurence Sterne, Theodore Dreiser, and H.G. Wells were incorrigible philanderers; that it was generally considered unwise to leave one’s wife alone with Arthur Koestler

↓ that Aldous Huxley and J.B. Priestley lost their virginity in the same year (but not to each other); that Bowen apparently remained a virgin until the age of thirty-five, even though she married at twenty-three; that E.M. Forster was a virgin until he was thirty-nine; that Jane Austen probably died a virgin

↓ that F. Scott Fitzgerald was worried that he had a small penis, so he asked (of all people) Ernest Hemingway to have a quick look; that Papa, magnanimously, said it wasn’t all that small

↓ that Malcolm Lowry really did have an embarrassingly small penis

↓ that Sutherland includes a number of sceptical references to the way in which modern literary criticism and biography place undue emphasis on psychosexual interpretations, but regularly mentions his subjects’ sexual proclivities anyway

↓ that the relevance of such matters is never established in any consistent or convincing way, and the more one encounters them, the more it becomes apparent that any conclusions drawn from this kind of personal information can only be presumptuous and highly speculative – with the obvious exception of Fitzgerald and Hemingway comparing willies

↓ that literary biography has its place; that it can stimulate interest in a writer’s work, throw light on his or her preoccupations, and provide essential background information, but that the best way to learn about what novelists have thought and felt is still to read their novels

↓ that, as Sutherland writes of some apparent biographical parallels in the novels of Ian McEwan, ‘one should not push such things too far, or any distance at all, but keyholes into the lives of novelists are, sometimes, irresistible, however one hates oneself for peeking through them’

↓ that many novelists do not like biographers and think they should mind their own damn business.