Now it's time to leave the history classroom and go down the hall to the English lesson. Secret Lives of Great Authors contains irreverent and fun-filled bios of all the writers you were forced to read in school, from Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson to J. D. Salinger and Sylvia Plath. And guess what? These people were more interesting than your teachers ever let on...Franz Kafka chewed his food 45 times before swallowing. W. B. Yeats paid surgeons to transplant monkey glands into his scrotum. J. R. R. Tolkien slept in his bathroom. As a boy, Ernest Hemingway was dressed in girl's clothes by his mother - in fact, she often introduced him as my daughter.