/lit/ - Literature

I didn't go to book school, I went to books.

Literally unironically just go to the library.

Clark Ashton smith only attended high school yet he had fantastic prose and a delirious imagination. He became erudite on his own time largely.

>>18217340
>>18217373
Both admirers of Schopenhauer btw.

>>18217340

Shakespeare.

Tolstoy went to university only to receive bad grades and disdaine the teachers for having given him the expectation of brilliant lectures and then offering only mediocre meditations.

He reports how, as soon as the teacher started speaking in the first class, he got bored and started drawing caricatures in his notebook.

Another funny episode is an occasion when he was punished with another student to spend the night in a room where the students had to stay as a chastisement. He spent the night imitating the teachers and explaining to the guy (who must have been as sleepy as hell) how he, Tolstoy, would change teaching methods if he was responsible for Kazam University.

If I'm not mistaken the first time he tried to go to university, he got grades that were way too low and wasn't accepted, which made him so furious and with pride hurt so much that he locked himself in his room and stayed a week without wanting to talk to anyone.

Some time during his period on the University he had to be hospitalized for gonorrhea treatment.

He never finished any course.

>>18217340
Most of them.

>>18217340
Steven King

>>18217340
E E Cummings didn't go to college iirc

>>18217340
>Here lies Wagner, who came to nothing:
>Decorated not even by the crummiest order;
>Couldn't lure a dog out from behind the stove;
>Didn't get even [so much as] a university doctorate.
>Hier liegt Wagner, der nichts geworden,
>Nicht einmal Ritter vom lumpigsten Orden;
>Nicht einen Hund hinterm Ofen entlockt 'er,
>Universitäten nicht mal ’nen Doktor.
- written before the success of Rienzi

>>18217428
Unbelievably based

>>18217428
Funny how much I relate to this, but I, like the idiot I am, just threw money at the bursar until I got a degree 6 years later.

Basically all of them.

>>18217985

Well, Tolstoy inherited a large property from his family and basically didn’t had to work to earn a living. He only needed to look out for how the administrators where handling the property and that was it. A degree didn’t really matter to him as a source of income.

>>18217340
Billy Shakes

>>18217340
McCarthy dropped out only after 2 years to work as a mechanic and write his first novel.

>>18218345
It didn’t really matter to me either. I just felt like a retard and didn’t want to face my family as a dropout or be a NEET. It was a huge mistake in retrospect.

You mean the majority of all writers?

>>18218680
No, just writers of amazing literature.

>>18218670
>It was a huge mistake in retrospect.
why?

>>18217782
pretty sure dude went to harvard

Hermann Hesse

Ran away from seminary school, tried to commit suicide, got put in a mental asylum, recovered and finished a college preparatory course, got a job as a clock tower maintenance worker, got a job in a bookshop where he read and wrote, became the best writer of self help fiction ive come across, , spent most of his adult life in the countryside with his family surrounded by nature, won the Nobel Prize in literature.
Dude figured it out and made it.

>>18219717
It just wasn’t worth it. My parents stopped funding me in my final year and a half and being basically a kid I had to take out student loans to finish. So I piled up a bunch of debt for a degree that I didn’t even really want while I spent the entirety of my early 20s just sort of wasting away in a provincial-ish college town out in the middle of nowhere. Then, because I had the degree, I proceeded to spend the next 3 years floundering about trying to put together some sort of career predicated on that degree, which was also a mistake. I can’t say it’s even paid off for me financially. There has really been next to no upside thus far, a total waste of time, effort, and money.

Charles Dickens never went iirc

Homer

>>18217340
Not sure about this one.

>>18221141
What self-help books did he write?

Melville

>>18217340
Gore Vidal never went to University after graduating from Phillip Exeter Academy.

>>18221163
>I had to take out student loans to finish
>had to
Nowhere else in the world but America people are so quick to get in debt. Do you motherfuckers know about working or is college plus a job too hard for burgers? Every time I see someone complain about student loans I can’t help but wonder how the fuck are Americans so fucking dense. It’s unfathomable everywhere else to get in debt for a lifetime over a degree. What the fuck is the matter with you people?

>>18222599
...who wants to tell him?

>>18222472
The majority of the novels he's written that i've read contain many elements of self-help and for want of a better term, they're self-help fiction, i.e Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, Narcissus and Goldmund.

>>18217340
Think of all that hacks and nobody writers that came from schools.

Orwell
DH Lawrence

>>18222599
Don't get the impression of debt that Americans tend to give. Like anything, they enjoy exaggerating how bad it is because that makes it more interesting. Debt is not fun, and ideally you'd have none, however student loan debt is a very specific sort of debt. It is designed to be paid back. Those who lament having student loan debt into their 30s can do so because the required payments are low. Not to mention, the cost of going to your State's college is equivalent to what it costs to go to an English or Canadian university. Those spouting off 6-figure numbers, you must remember, deliberately chose an expensive private college that didn't award them any scholarships. Which, is the other thing. American colleges will shower you with money, especially if you're poor. I had a friend whose total cost went from 70k a year to 600, because he is poor (no he is not colored).

>>18217340
Eliezer Yudkowsky

>>18222824
I know people who came from complete poverty and worked two jobs to put themselves through college and never once in their life they thought “well maybe if I get a cheap house’s worth of loans I’ll get through it”. It’s the stupidest shit ever.
And it’s not like Americans get caught off guard because it’s a constant topic everywhere; I know about it and I have never set foot in the US so I can only imagine the horror stories that American students hear about every day.
Getting in debt to go to college is not even a distant, remote possibility for anyone not American. It’s absolute nonsense.
The fact that there are absolute retards who end up in six figure debt for a meager four year degree blows my fucking mind, even if they are outliers in the big stupid game of getting in debt for college.

>>18217373
Was the first author that came to mind

>>18217428
Amazing

>>18222887
Right, I think people aren't willing to admit that they picked an expensive private school over a state school because that would be admitting to the fact that they've spent 200k for what is essentially an ego project. Being able to say you went somewhere cool and expensive is nice, but not 200k nice