Writers between the covers : the scandalous romantic lives of legendary literary casanovas, coquettes, and cads / Shannon McKenna Schmidt and Joni Rendon.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 281-286)

Folie à deux. Some like it hot : Arthur Miller ; Three's a crowd ; The love song of T.S. Eliot ; Breaking up is hard to do ; Beautiful and damned : F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald ; Cougars and cradle robbers ; All war, no peace : Leo Tolstoy ; Fight club -- Bad boys, scoundrels, and rogues. Hell hath no fury : Ernest Hemingway ; Behind every successful man ; The alpha Mailer : Norman Mailer ; Mad about you (Edgar Allan Poe) ; Mad, bad, and dangerous to know : Lord Byron ; Natural-born lady-killers ; Never curse me : Gustave Flaubert ; Six degrees of copulation ; Go your own way : The Beats ; If these walls could talk -- The joy of sex. Sexistentialism : Simone de Beauvoir ; The art of seduction ; Web of lies : Anaïs Nin ; Lawrence in lust (D.H. Lawrence) ; Shock and awe : Tennessee Williams ; Talk dirty to me (James Joyce) -- Unlucky in love. Sweet sorrow : Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) ; Happily never after (Carson McCullers) ; House of secrets : Daphne du Maurier ; Lonely heart (Emily Dickinson) ; Parisian passion : Edith Wharton ; The wit of a wounded woman (Dorothy Parker) -- Your cheating heart. A tale of two Dickenses : Charles Dickens ; Covert affairs ; Turbulent times : Frederick Douglass ; Mr. not so nice guy (Richard Wright) ; Born to be Wilde : Oscar Wilde ; The pursuit of pleasure -- Paradise lost. Runaway romantics : Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley ; Tragic turns ; Eclipse of the heart : Voltaire ; Eternal flames ; A marriage of minds : Virginia Woolf ; Romance with death (Sylvia Plath) -- This side of paradise. Count the ways : Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning ; How do I love thee? ; Romantic suspense : Agatha Christie ; Awake ye muses nine ; Delicious dish : Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas ; First impressions ; Come sail away : Robert Louis Stevenson ; You've got mail.

Details the scandalous breakups, controversial affairs, and fairy-tale romances of famous writers, including coverage of Norman Mailer's attack on his second wife at a party, Edith Wharton's secret lover, and Anaïs Nin's bigamous relationships.