Three more strange author hobbies

After writing yesterday's article about the hobbies of famous authors, I learned of a few more - some of them more weird than others!

Flannery O'Connor: Raising peacocks
O'Connor was obsessed with all birds from an early age. In fact, her first brush with fame came when she was only six years old, and had a trained chicken that made the national news. She raised hundreds of them on her family farm in Georgia, including ducks, emu, toucans, and all manner of exotic birds. But peacocks were her favorite by far, as she described in her essay "The King of the Birds."

Sylvia Plath: Beekeeping
After moving to Devon in 1962, just months before her suicide, Sylvia Plath took up the hobby of beekeeping. Just before her death, her experience with bees took center stage in a group of poems about bees.

Before his death when she was only eight years old, Plath's father was an entomologist at Boston University who had been a noted authority on bumblebees, so perhaps it's only natural that Plath should start keeping hives. Nevertheless it seems far too apt that Plath would choose a hobby with so much risk of pain, for the reward of sweet golden honey.

Cormac McCarthy: All the hobbies
One of contemporary literature's great recluses, Cormac McCarthy gave a rare interview to a New York Times reporter in 1992 to help promote All The Pretty Horses which was just about to be published. In the interview, McCarthy said that he suffered from a great proliferation of hobbies. When he was a young boy, the teacher asked if any of the students had any hobbies, and McCarthy was the only one who raised his hand.

"I had every hobby there was. There was no hobby I didn't have, name anything, no matter how esoteric, I had found it and dabbled in it. I could have given everyone a hobby and still had 40 or 50 to take home."

Image courtesy Flickr/Wouter Beckers