1. Chester Arthur Was Canadian!

Garfield’s VP
Chester Arthur took office under the thickest cloud of suspicion. As a lieutenant in Senator Roscoe Conkling’s political machine, Arthur held one of the most lucrative positions in government—collector for the port of New York. For seven years, Arthur raked in approximately $40,000 annually (about $700,000 today), running a corrupt spoils system for thousands of payroll employees. With so much money and power, Arthur developed an affinity for fancy clothes and earned the nickname “the Gentleman Boss.” But his luck didn’t last. President Rutherford Hayes eventually stepped in and fired him from the post.

Even with the kickback scandal and claims that he’d been born in Canada (which should’ve disqualified him for the vice presidency), Arthur still managed to get elected on James Garfield’s 1880 ticket. After Garfield passed away 199 days into his presidency, Arthur didn’t hesitate to sign the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act. Much to the chagrin of Conkling, the Act revamped civil service by effectively killing the same patronage system that made Arthur very, very rich. In cleaning up civil service, Arthur also cleaned up his reputation, and he exited the White House a hero.

2. William Rufus de Vane King was (Pretty Definitely) Gay

Pierce’s VP
William R. King was sworn into office in Cuba, becoming the only executive officer to take the oath on foreign soil. King had gone to Cuba to recuperate from tuberculosis and severe alcoholism, but it didn’t work. He died in 1853 after being vice president for just 25 days.

That might not be the most memorable thing about King, though. It’s widely rumored that the former VP was homosexual. Further still, he’s suspected of being James Buchanan’s lover. Neither King nor Buchanan ever married, and they lived together in Washington for 15 years before Buchanan became president. Of course, King’s predilection for wearing scarves and wigs only fanned the rumors. President Andrew Jackson used to call him “Miss Nancy,” and Aaron Brown, a fellow Southern Democrat, dubbed him “Aunt Fancy.”

3. Henry Wallace: Soviet Apologist

FDR’s 2nd VP
Henry Wallace was a big Franklin Roosevelt fan and supported his entire platform, which is why Roosevelt handpicked him as his third-term running mate in 1940. Wallace wasn’t popular with the Democratic Party, but when Roosevelt made it clear he wouldn’t run without him, the party acquiesced.

As vice president, Wallace made many international goodwill trips. Most famously, he traveled to the Soviet Union, where he experienced a political transformation that resulted in him becoming an avowed Soviet apologist. His communist leanings did nothing for his image, especially once he became secretary of commerce under President Truman. In 1948, Wallace unsuccessfully ran for president on the Progressive Party ticket, espousing views that sounded shockingly Marxist. He even described corporations as “midget Hitlers” attempting to crush the labor class.

But nobody can say Wallace didn’t know how to own up to his mistakes. In 1952, he recanted his support of the Soviet Union in a magazine article called “Where I was Wrong.” By then, however, his political career was over. Wallace spent the rest of his life conducting agricultural experiments on his farm in New York. [Image courtesy of Ron Wade Buttons.]

4. Richard M. Johnson’s 3 Black Mistresses

Van Buren’s VP
Despite his credentials as a war hero and a Kentucky senator, Vice President Richard M. Johnson was never accepted in Washington. Perhaps that’s because he dressed like a farmhand, cursed like a sailor, and made no secret of his three black mistresses, who were also his slaves. The first mistress bore him two daughters before she passed away; the second tried to run off with a Native American chief, but Johnson captured and resold her; and the third was the second one’s sister.

Johnson attempted to introduce this third mistress into polite society, but the couple wasn’t well-received. With the support of Andrew Jackson, Johnson landed the vice presidency under Martin Van Buren in 1836. After four years of public relations disasters, Jackson withdrew his support. Nonetheless, Van Buren kept Johnson on his ticket, and the two lost their re-election bid in 1840.

5. Aaron Burr Was a Cassanova

Jefferson’s VP
No story on vice presidents would be complete without Aaron Burr—best known for shooting and killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804. After the incident, Burr went back to presiding over the Senate. From there, he plotted a treasonous conspiracy to become emperor of the western United States and Mexico.

The plan could have worked, but one of Burr’s co-conspirators ratted him out. He was tried in 1807 before the Supreme Court, which found him not guilty, mainly because he hadn’t actually committed the treason yet. A free man, Burr turned his sights on Florida. He went to France and tried to convince Napoleon Bonaparte to help him conquer the swampland, but that plan foundered, too.

Although his political high jinks often failed, Burr consistently found success with the ladies. After his wife died in 1794, Burr remained a bachelor for 40 years, making the acquaintance of several eligible socialites. He enjoyed flirtations with Philadelphia debutantes, as well as a widow named Dolley Payne Todd—ater known as Dolley Madison, wife of James Madison. At age 76, Burr married a wealthy widow of ill-repute and plundered her fortune. Citing numerous infidelities on his part, she filed for divorce and was actually granted it. Unfortunately for her, it came through on the day Burr died.

6. John Tyler Borrowed Cash to Get to His Inauguration

William Henry Harrison’s VP
When President Harrison succumbed to pneumonia in 1841 after only a month in office, John Tyler became the first vice president to take the Oval Office as the result of a president’s death. Understandably, he was totally unprepared for the job. Like previous VPs, Tyler had expected to carry the title without responsibilities. He’d actually taken such a lax approach to the position that he was enjoying life on his Virginia farm when a messenger brought news of Harrison’s demise. Tyler had to borrow money from a neighbor to catch the riverboat back to Washington.

As president, Tyler’s administration was largely unremarkable, except that he annexed the Republic of Texas and became the first president to have Congress override his veto. Tyler was also the first president to receive no official state recognition of his death. Why? By the time of his passing in 1862, he was an official in the Confederacy.

7. Andrew Johnson Took the Oath Sloshed

Lincoln’s VP
Andrew Johnson took his 1865 vice-presidential oath drunk as a skunk and belligerent as hell. Having grown up dirt poor, Johnson felt the aristocracy in Washington had abused his kinfolk. Glassy-eyed and smelling of whiskey, he reminded Congress, the Supreme Court, the Cabinet, and pretty much everyone within hearing distance that they owed their positions to “plebeians” such as himself, then kissed the Bible and staggered away.

Needless to say, his address was poorly received. The New York World opined, “To think that one frail life stands between this insolent, clownish creature and the presidency! May God bless and spare Abraham Lincoln!” Unfortunately, God didn’t. The South surrendered six days before Lincoln’s assassination, leaving Johnson to handle Reconstruction—a job he bungled so completely that Congress moved to impeach him. Johnson avoided being booted out of office by just one vote.

8. John Breckenridge Hid Out in Cuba

Buchanan’s VP
By all accounts, John C. Breckenridge was a Kentucky gentleman in the grandest sense. He had an impressive career as a lawyer and a representative in the Kentucky House. More notably, at age 36, he became the youngest vice president in history. But, like Aaron Burr, things took a turn for Breckenridge when he was charged with treason. In September 1861, only a few months after his vice presidential term had ended, Union and Confederate forces invaded his home state of Kentucky. Breckenridge cast his lot with the Confederates, and the federal government promptly indicted him.

Breckenridge headed south and became Jefferson Davis’ secretary of war. But when the Confederacy surrendered in 1865, Breckenridge was forced to go on the lam. He hid for the next two months in Georgia and Florida before escaping to Cuba. Breckinridge, his wife, and their children spent the next four years in exile, wandering through Canada, England, Europe, and the Middle East, until President Andrew Johnson issued a General Amnesty Proclamation on Christmas in 1868. The following March, Breckenridge returned to the country with his family, but his name wasn’t officially cleared until 1958, when a Kentucky circuit court judge dismissed his indictment.

9. Nelson Rockefeller Tore Down That Wall

Ford’s VP
Nelson Rockefeller, as his name suggests, was really, really rich. After a brief stint managing his family’s property and running oil companies, he turned to public service by taking a job in the State Department.

Rockefeller quickly gained a reputation as a rather strong-willed person. In 1933, he commissioned Mexican artist Diego Rivera to paint a large-scale mural in the lobby of the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center. The mural featured a likeness of Vladimir Lenin, and the overt reference to communism offended Rockefeller. He asked Rivera to change it to a face of an unknown man, and the artist refused. In response, Rockefeller had the whole mural torn down and carted out in pieces.

Rockefeller was equally dissatisfied with his gig as vice president. He refused to run with Ford on the Republican ticket in 1976.

10. Spiro Agnew, the Archie Bunker of the White House

Nixon’s VP
Spiro Agnew, who preferred to be called Ted, was a seemingly safe choice for Richard Nixon’s running mate in 1968—mainly because he faded easily into the background. But once in office, Agnew thrust himself into the limelight. By delivering a series of divisive speeches defending the Vietnam War and attacking peaceniks, Agnew became the crotchety Archie Bunker of the White House. He lambasted his enemies, peppering his rants with phrases such as “supercilious sophisticates,” “vicars of vacillation,” and “pusillanimous pussyfooting.”

Still, much of the country loved him, especially as he remained unsullied by the Watergate scandal. When word got out that the Justice Department was investigating him for extortion and bribery, Agnew vehemently denied the charges. In September of 1973, Agnew spoke at the National Federation of Republican Women in front of thousands of screaming fans, many bearing “Spiro is our Hero” signs. He swore to them, “I will not resign if indicted!”

Two weeks later, however, he did just that. Agnew agreed to a plea bargain that involved leaving his post as vice president and paying $150,000 in back taxes. A former lawyer, Agnew was disbarred and took up writing to pay off his debts. In 1976, he penned The Canfield Decision, a tale of a vice president who becomes involved with militant Zionists and is consumed by his own ambition. In 1980, he covered some of the same ground in his autobiography, Go Quietly … Or Else.

This article originally appeared in mental_floss magazine.

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As The New Yorker’s star cartoonist from the 1930s to the 1980s, Charles Addams practically invented dark humor in America. His cartoons found comedy at the intersection of the bizarre and the everyday, featuring ordinary people harboring exotically morose tendencies. Over the course of his lifetime, Addams illustrated 68 covers for The New Yorker and contributed more than 1,300 cartoons to the magazine, inspiring everyone from The Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson to film director Tim Burton. If the stories of writers such as Dorothy Parker, Ogden Nash, and John Cheever were the lifeblood of The New Yorker, then Addams’ drawings were its spirit.

Charles Addams’ most enduring creation, The Addams Family, reflected American values in a funhouse mirror, showcasing the paranoia, the darkness, and the sweetness of suburban life. In the past seven decades, The Addams Family has spawned two live-action television series, two animated cartoons, and two blockbuster feature films—and the reincarnations keep coming. Right now, there’s a musical of the cartoon on Broadway, and Tim Burton is slated to direct a new film version. But as creepy, kooky, mysterious, and spooky as the characters are, they have nothing on Charles Addams himself.

The Man Behind the Macabre

In his heyday, Charles Addams was a celebrity, the type of person everyone wanted to know. Director Alfred Hitchcock once made a pilgrimage to Addams’ front door, just to catch a glimpse of him in his natural habitat. Popular lore had it that the cartoonist was a regular patient at New York State sanitariums, and that he preferred his martinis garnished with eyeballs. And while many of the stories about Addams were exaggerated, there’s no doubt he had a penchant for the peculiar. Instead of a standard coffee table, Addams used a Civil War-era embalming table. He also kept a collection of antique crossbows above his sofa, and he used a young girl’s tombstone (“Little Sarah, Aged Three”) as a perch for his cocktails.

With quirks like that, you wouldn’t guess that the artist had such a normal upbringing. Charles Addams was born January 7, 1912, in Westfield, New Jersey, the only child of a piano salesman. He was a smiling baby who grew into a smiling boy, loved indulgently by his parents and well liked by his friends and classmates. “I know it would be more interesting, perhaps, if I had a ghastly childhood—chained to an iron beam and thrown a can of Alpo every day,” Addams once told an interviewer. “I’m one of those strange people who actually had a happy childhood.”

And yet, Addams’ fascination with the macabre began early in life. Even as a child, he loved to explore graveyards. At the age of 8, he was caught breaking into a creepy Victorian mansion near his home. And when America entered World War I, Addams took to drawing pictures of German Kaiser Wilhelm II being stabbed, shot, run over by a train, or boiled in oil.

A New York State of Mind

As fate would have it, while Addams was in high school, his future employer was beginning to emerge. The New Yorker published its first slender volume in 1925. It started out as a sophisticated humor weekly, relying heavily on elegant illustrations and comic drawings. Witty cartoons soon became the magazine’s hallmark, and Addams knew he wanted to work there from the moment he first saw a copy.

After high school, Addams drifted through several colleges in search of a good art program. He finally landed at the Grand Central School of Art, perched atop Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal. He was still a student there when he sold his first cartoon to The New Yorker—an unsigned sketch of a window-washer on a tall building. It ran on February 6, 1932, and earned Addams a check for $7.50.

That wasn’t quite enough to pay the bills, so Addams got a job retouching grisly crime scene photos for True Detective magazine. It wasn’t glamorous work, but it allowed the artist to hone and craft his style. Using a delicate ink wash technique, Addams discovered comic gold at the crossroads of the morbid and the mundane—simultaneously highlighting the magic and the horror of everyday life. In Addams’ world, a man opens his parachute to reveal that it was crocheted by his wife, and two lovers snuggle by a moonlit pond where a shark fin is poking out. In one of his more famous cartoons, a crowd watches an octopus drag a hapless man into a manhole. As another man passes by, he says to his friend, “It doesn’t take much to collect a crowd in New York.”

By 1940, Addams had become a regular at The New Yorker, allowing him to quit True Detective and concentrate full-time on his drawings. That year, he published the cartoon that would make him one of the magazine’s best paid and most used artists. In it, a skier leaves behind a set of tracks that indicate he’s just passed through a tree, rather than around it. The New Yorker fielded more reprint requests for that image than any other cartoon that year. Two months after “The Skier” was published, Addams received a letter from an Illinois psychologist, who told him that she’d been using the image to determine the intelligence of mentally challenged adults. She would ask her patients why the image was funny, and if they didn’t get it, she pegged their intelligence as lower than a 9-year-old. During the next few years, “The Skier” was cribbed and plagiarized relentlessly. The gag was even used on the big screen in Abbott and Costello’s 1943 film Hit the Ice.

Ladies’ Man

As Charles Addams’ fame continued to grow, so did his social life. He quickly developed a reputation as a man-about-town, known for spending late nights in bars with pretty women. But in 1942, Addams met a fellow Westfield native named Barbara Day. A statuesque woman with black hair and pale skin, Day looked quite similar to Morticia Addams, the matriarch of his Addams Family comics. Addams had drawn Morticia for the first time four years earlier, so in Barbara, he’d found the woman of his dreams. Before long, the couple was engaged.

That same year, Addams was drafted for service in World War II. He was assigned to the Army Signal Corps—the group responsible for producing propaganda films and posters—where he found himself surrounded by artists, screenwriters, and fellow cartoonists. In the end, the war did little to impede Addams’ career. He continued working for The New Yorker, as well as other magazines and advertising agencies, and he also found time to see Barbara. By the end of the war, Addams and Day were married, and his work was being shown in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. [Image: © Bettmann/CORBIS]

Addams and his wife were soon living the glamorous life. They bought fancy sports cars, posed for pictorials in Harper’s Bazaar, and threw the kinds of parties that people talked about. Too many parties, perhaps. After eight years of marriage, the couple split up. She wanted children, and he did not. Essentially a child himself, Addams expressed apprehension about becoming a father. Also, his womanizing hadn’t stopped at the altar.

Focus on the Family

While Addams’ marriage was breaking up in real life, his comic strip family was expanding. Morticia entered the world in 1938. Four years later, she got a husband, Gomez, a squat and ugly man with a pug nose. Gomez was a political statement of sorts; Addams, a devout Democrat, based the character on Thomas E. Dewey, then the Republican Governor of New York.

The Addams Family added a son, Pugsley, the following year, introduced while building a coffin in shop class. Daughter Wednesday came next, attempting to poison her brother. The last to take his place was Uncle Fester, who first appeared as a ghoulish bald man in the audience of a movie theater, laughing as everyone around him cried. Uncle Fester, Addams later revealed, was the character that he related to the most.

On the page, Addams’ characters were distinctly more wicked than their TV counterparts. In a Christmas drawing from The New Yorker in 1946, the family is seen on the roof of their dilapidated Victorian mansion, tipping a pot of boiling oil on the carolers below. Readers loved the cartoon so much that the magazine printed it on Christmas cards.

By the 1950s, The Addams Family had become so popular that it spawned a line of merchandise, including silk scarves and crockery. But oddly enough, the characters didn’t even have names until 1963, when the series was turned into a TV show. In his haste to name them, Addams almost gave Pugsley the name “Pubert,” but at the last minute, he decided it was too gross.

The Addams Family’s transition to TV wasn’t an easy one. In fact, it almost didn’t happen—thanks to Addams’ second wife, Barbara Barb. Addams and Barb had wed in 1954, and the marriage was a disaster from the beginning. The attraction was clear: Barb looked even more like Morticia than Barbara Day. (She even got a nose job to match the character.) But she was an abusive woman who once attacked her husband with an African spear. She was also a lawyer, and she used her legal skills to force Addams to sign over the rights to many of his cartoons. By the time the couple divorced just two years into their marriage, Barb had complete control of The Addams Family rights, and she stalled production on the television show until the producers agreed to give her more money.

When the series finally premiered on ABC in 1964, Charles Addams wasn’t a fan. He loved the theme song, but he complained that the family wasn’t “half as evil” as his original characters. Still, the American public loved it, and the program brought a new level of fame and fortune to Addams. It also spawned even more merchandise, including bubble gum and board games.

Despite its commercial success, The Addams Family was abruptly cancelled in 1966. Suddenly, Addams found himself without a significant portion of his income. At the time, he was dating Jackie Kennedy, who broke up with him soon after the checks from the television show stopped rolling in. To make matters worse, The Addams Family had also disappeared from the pages of The New Yorker. The editors had decided that once the family was on television, it could no longer be in print. Addams kept Gomez and the gang alive through various advertising campaigns, but as one biographer claimed, he remained bitter towards the magazine for disowning his family.

Death, His Old Friend

Well into the 1980s, Addams continued to make money as a freelance artist, selling his work to magazines and galleries. Even after five decades of making cartoons, he showed little sign of slowing down. He still liked fast cars, though he wasn’t racing them anymore, and he still enjoyed the company of women. In 1980, he married his longtime girlfriend, Marilyn “Tee” Miller. The wedding was held in a pet cemetery, where the bride wore black, as did the attendants.

Charles Addams died on September 29, 1988, at the age of 76. He suffered a heart attack while sitting in his parked car. His wife told The New York Times, “He’s always been a car buff, so it was a nice way to go.”

Of course, that was hardly the end for Addams. His cartoons live on, largely because they tap into something in the American psyche. People connected—and still connect—to Addams’ fascination with the dark side of humanity. As biographer Linda Davis wrote, “His cartoons, unlike those of so many other cartoonists, were for the most part timeless and dealt with universal themes. They’re still funny today; we still get them today.” Indeed, Addams drew upon his fears—fears about marriage, fears about alienation, fears about death—to show us that on the dark side of life, there is light, or at the very least, levity.

This article originally appeared in mental_floss magazine. If you’re in a subscribing mood, here are the details. Got an iPad or another tablet device? We also offer digital subscriptions through Zinio.

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Here’s our totally comprehensive, really scientific overview of good parenting in fiction:

1. Atticus Finch
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

The widowed father of Jem and Scout, Atticus Finch is one of the great heroes of American literature. Steering his young children along the path of moral rectitude is hard in the Jim Crow South, and when Atticus, a lawyer, unsuccessfully defends an innocent black man from charges that he raped a white woman, it becomes even more difficult. But his own belief in rightness, morality, and good, even in the face of an unfair world, is communicated to his kids — and to the world. His impact on the legal profession, especially in the South, was also profound: The Atticus Finch Society, part of the Alabama Law Foundation, was founded to serve the legal needs of the poor and named after a fictional lawyer who “epitomizes the type of professional, and person, lawyers strive to be.”

2. Alex and Kate Murry
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

Tesseracts are real and Meg and Charles Murry’s scientist father has disappeared into one—and it’s up to these two brilliant but socially awkward children to save him. When it was published in 1962, A Wrinkle in Time was a sci-fi gift to all those nerdy kids out there for whom Star Trek hadn’t been invented yet. And the Murry parents—beautiful and smart microbiologist Kate and tesseract physicist Alex—made being scientists seem so cool. Who wouldn’t want parents like that?

3. The Weasleys
Harry Potter series by JK Rowling

Harry Potter wanted them to adopt him—and we wouldn’t mind either. Though Harry was already remarkably well-adjusted for a child who’d been forced to sleep in the spider-filled cupboard under the stairs, his friendship with Ron Weasley and his family showed him what a loving family really looked like. Mom Molly Weasley was kind, fiercely protective of her children—her battle with Bellatrix Lestrange in the final book was immensely satisfying—and knits a mean jumper. Dad Arthur Weasley was slightly bumbling, loves Muggle stuff, and still a kid at heart. Best of all, they loved each other as much as they loved their children.

4. Marmee
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Marmee is the glue that holds the Little Women together through the Civil War and their father’s long absence. Kind and charitable, she’s their moral compass, their comfort in troubled times. Without her, the four girls, Jo, Meg, Amy and Beth, are lost.

5. Mr. and Mrs. Little
Stuart Little by EB White

Interspecies procreation is typically cause for concern, but not for Mr. and Mrs. Little. When their son, Stuart, was born a mouse, the kind, though perhaps a bit dense, Littles treated him just like any other member of the family. A member of the family who had a long tail, whiskers, slept in a cigarette box and could climb up lamp cords.

6. Ma and Pa Ingalls
Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Though Laura Ingalls Wilder’s stories of growing up in the Indian Territory, now Kansas, in the mid to late 19th century are actually autobiographical, the books tend to be found in the children’s fiction part of the bookstore, so they make the list. Pa was a true pioneer with a serious case of wanderlust: He could build a house by hand and skin a rabbit, but still remained a gentleman, kind, courteous and upstanding. Ma Ingalls, a true pioneer’s wife, instructed her children to treat others with care.

7. Mr. and Mrs. Quimby
Ramona series by Beverly Cleary

Ramona Quimby, age 8, is a bit of a handful. Her imagination—and she’s got lots of it—often gets her into situations, like the time she went to school with her pajamas under her clothes because she was pretending to be a fireman. Or the time she put her doll in the oven. Or the time she squeezed an entire tube of toothpaste into the sink.

Her parents, Bob and Dorothy, meanwhile, are real parents, who have to deal with real things like quitting smoking, having children young, getting laid off, and 8-year-olds who accidentally dye themselves blue. And they even get in fights, like real parents do. But throughout it all, they manage to remain patient and affectionate with their children; they’re not perfect, but they’re pretty good.

8. Carlisle and Esme Cullen
The Twilight Saga by Stephenie Meyer

OK, so they’re vampires. But they’re good vampires, with fabulous dress sense, lots of money, and consciences. Carlisle Cullen is a doctor at the local hospital, having overcome his natural vampiric attraction to blood, and is the founder of the Forks coven that includes dreamy Edward. His compassion and kindness is what keeps the family “vegetarian” and from draining the little rainy town dry. His wife, Esme, loves her adopted children deeply and is the kind of warm, calming influence the family needs. Best of all, they love Bella, Edward’s human beloved, as one of their own.

9. Baloo the Bear, Bagheera the Blank Panther, and the wolves
The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling

After they save him from becoming tiger Shere Khan’s meal, Father Wolf and Mother Wolf raise the hairless man-cub Mowgli as one of their own. But it’s up to Baloo the sleepy bear and Bagheera the panther to teach the boy the Law of the Jungle—thereby becoming the coolest godparents in the world.

10. The Gilbreths
Cheaper By The Dozen by Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Jr., and Ernestine Gilbreth Carey

So, the Gilbreths were actual people, not fiction, and this charming book, published in 1948, is a biography written by their children. But—and we mean this as a compliment—the parents are so lovely as to almost seem made up. Frank Gilbreth and his wife, Lillian, are world-famous efficiency experts whose studies in time and motion changed the way people worked. If Frank had his way, it would have also changed the way people raised children, especially after their incredible fecundity produced 12 children. Having an even dozen children meant that the Gilbreths could apply some of their expertise in their Montclair, New Jersey, home. Hilarity ensues, as does an overwhelming sense of warmth and happiness.

The two children wrote a follow up book, Belles on Their Toes, recounting what happened after Frank’s death in 1924, which left Lillian with house full of children, the youngest just 2 years old, and a business to run. Mother Lillian manages to keep it all together, with good humor and warmth, and the book manages to stay away from the maudlin.

Now it’s your turn. Who would you add to the list?

Today is October 10, 2010—10.10.10! To celebrate, we’ve got all our writers working on 10 lists, which we’ll be posting throughout the day and night. To see all the lists we’ve published so far, click here.

Educating Gabito

Gabriel García Márquez grew up in Aracataca, Colombia, a hardscrabble banana town that was barely a stop on the railway. His father, an undereducated telegraph operator, had fallen in love with a girl beyond his status—the daughter of Colonel Nicolás Márquez Mejía. Her family vigorously opposed their union, but that only strengthened the couple’s resolve to marry. They maintained a secret relationship, communicating by telegraph and passed notes and stealing moments together at Mass. In 1926, after a priest lobbied the family on their behalf, the pair finally married. They had their first child, Gabriel, in 1927. Only a few months later, they left him to live with his grandparents while they moved to the port city of Barranquilla to open a pharmacy.

As a boy, he was simply “Gabito”—a shy child who blinked compulsively when he was nervous. He struggled to learn how to read and developed a habit of drawing his stories rather than writing them down. But he was the apple of his grandfather’s eye. Whatever disdain the Colonel once had for his daughter’s marriage, it had been softened by Gabito’s birth. As García Márquez described it, his grandfather “took [him] to the circus and the cinema and was [his] umbilical cord with history and reality.”

His grandmother, the indomitable Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, made an equally strong impression, “always telling fables, family legends, and organizing our life according to the messages she received in her dreams.” García Márquez credits her with his “supernatural view of reality.” This was a woman who went blind in her old age, but successfully convinced her doctor that she could still see. When he examined her, she described in detail all of the objects in her room, convincing him that her vision had returned. In truth, she’d simply memorized the contents of the room.

When García Márquez was 10 years old, his grandfather died. So, Gabito and his two siblings went to live with their parents in Barranquilla. It was a difficult time for the boy, having only known his parents as infrequent visitors.

Things grew more tense as his mother continued to have children (she bore a total of 11), and his father relocated the family to the town of Sucre. Eventually, Gabito ended up back in Barranquilla, where he was enrolled at a prestigious Jesuit secondary school. García Márquez was a brilliant scholarship student, known to wear his father’s old suits and recite long works of poetry from memory.

His education continued outside the classroom, as well. At age 13, he was introduced to the world of women when he lost his virginity to a prostitute. (She later informed him that his younger brother was a frequent visitor to her bed.) Two years later, he began an affair with an older married woman, who came up with an ingenious system for getting him to do his schoolwork: Failing grades meant no sex. He graduated with honors and went on to win a scholarship to a prestigious college outside of Bogotá.

Not surprisingly, the seeds of García Márquez’s later novels were all planted in his youth. His grandfather, grandmother, parents, siblings, assorted aunts and uncles—even the prostitute—all make appearances in his work. His hometown of Aracataca would famously become the Macondo of One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) and Leaf Storm (1955), and his parents’ troubled courtship was thinly veiled as the centerpiece of Love in the Time of Cholera (1985).

One Hundred Years of Solvency

In 1947, 20-year-old García Márquez decided to abandon law school and pursue writing. Much to his father’s dismay, he dropped out and became a reporter for El Heraldo, a liberal newspaper in Barranquilla. This was during the days of La Violencia, a period of bloody civil unrest that threatened to tear Colombia apart. With daily reports of rape, murder, and the government’s oppressive sanctions on the press, it was a challenging time to be a journalist. Earning just three pesos a story, García Márquez often went hungry.

He was also writing a novel. In his spare moments, García Márquez tapped out the manuscript for Leaf Storm. It took seven years to find a publisher, but the book finally came out in 1955. Although it garnered good reviews, the novel never sold well. That same year, García Márquez serialized the true account of Colombian sailors who’d been shipwrecked. The news story directly contradicted a government report of the incident and revealed that corruption in the navy had led to the sailors’ deaths. García Márquez became so unpopular with the government that the newspaper sent him abroad for his own safety.

He spent the next several years desperately poor in Europe, living mostly in Rome and Paris and briefly in communist Eastern Europe. While overseas, he wrote No One Writes to the Colonel (1961) and In Evil Hour (1962), had a torrid affair with a Spanish actress, and continued to starve. When he finally returned to Colombia, he married his longtime love, Mercedes Barcha Pardo. García Márquez had first proposed to her when he was 18 and she was only 13. After more than a decade of courtship, most of which had been spent writing letters to one another, she consented to marry him.

García Márquez continued to work as a journalist, first in Havana at the start of the Cuban Revolution and then in New York. From there, he, his wife, and his infant son traveled by bus to Mexico. The trip opened his eyes to the American South and the homeland of William Faulkner, one of García Márquez’s greatest influences. (Some literary scholars have suggested that García Márquez lifted much of his style and lyricism from Faulkner.) It also inspired him to begin his breakthrough book, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

On June 26, 1961, Gabriel’s family arrived at a railway station in Mexico City with their last $20 and “nothing in their future.” García Márquez started writing, and in just 18 months, he’d completed the novel that would change his life. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, he used all of the storytelling techniques he’d picked up as a reporter. As he would later tell The New York Times, the “tricks you need to transform something which appears fantastic, unbelievable into something plausible, credible, those I learned from journalism … The key is to tell it straight. It is done by reporters and by country folk.”

Although the writing came quickly, it was not easy. To support his family, García Márquez sold his car, his hair dryer, and anything else that would bring in some cash. When it came time to send off the manuscript to his publishers in Buenos Aires, he could only afford to mail half of it.

Half was enough. With One Hundred Years of Solitude, García Márquez exploded onto the literary scene. While still living in Mexico, he quickly emerged as Latin America’s most beloved writer and was affectionately nicknamed “Gabo.” In Colombia, he became a symbol of national pride. The book would go on to sell more than 35 million copies and be translated into at least 35 languages.

¡Viva La Revolución!

Despite the fanciful nature of his work, García Márquez’s novels are firmly grounded in the politics of Latin America. He addresses guerrilla warfare, drug trafficking, the failures of communism, the evils of capitalism, and the dangerous meddling of the CIA. After the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the author began to use his status to get more involved in politics. He started publicly castigating the United States for using the “war on drugs” to intrude in Latin American affairs. And since the 1970s, he has acted as an intermediary between the Colombian government and leftist guerrillas.

García Márquez also found himself in high-powered company. While reporting on the Cuban Revolution, he became friends with Fidel Castro, and over the years, their relationship has deepened. Fidel has cooked him spaghetti dinners. García Márquez, in turn, has described the Cuban president as a “king” and a great literary man. He even showed Castro an early manuscript for Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981) so that Castro could point out flaws in the plot. The close relationship has led critics to call the author Castro’s “literary hatchet man.” However, García Márquez’s influence wasn’t enough to stop the Cuban government from convicting and executing one of his friends for treason in 1989.

In a 1982 article in The New York Times, the author explained that, as a Latin American writer, it’s his duty to be politically active. “The problems of our societies are mainly political, and the commitment of a writer is with the reality of all of society, not just with a small part of it,” he explained. “If not, he is as bad as the politicians who disregard a large part of our reality. That is why authors, painters, writers in Latin America get politically involved.”

García Márquez’s works continue to be politically charged. In 1996, he published News of a Kidnapping, a journalistic account of 10 people abducted by Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, and the convoluted machinations involved in rescuing them. The same year, he wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times recounting the Elian Gonzalez situation, in which his sympathies were clearly aligned with Cuba: “The real shipwreck of Elian did not take place on the high seas, but when he set foot on American soil.”

To a certain extent, García Márquez’s political activism is also about cultivating his own legend. In the mid-1970s, the author famously claimed that he wouldn’t publish anything again until Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was no longer in power. Gabo’s friends agreed that the declaration was made for a “calculated effect.” Moreover, García Márquez didn’t even stick to it. He published Love in the Time of Cholera not long after that.

Gabo in his Labyrinth

These days, Gabriel García Márquez, like his friend Fidel, is getting old. In the 1990s, he had a cancerous tumor removed from one of his lungs and lived through a bout of lymphatic cancer. Then, in July 1999, rumors of his impending death grew after someone took a sentimental poem about dying and attached García Márquez’s name to it. The poem quickly turned into a hoax e-mail that circulated the world and unleashed a hailstorm of headlines. It also touched a raw nerve. As García Márquez has gotten older, his output has slowed. Readers have been waiting since 2002 for him to produce the second part of his memoirs. His most recent novel, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, was published in 2004 to critical and commercial success. But at just 115 pages, audiences were left craving more. Even the controversies García Márquez has stirred up lately have been disappointing. In 2004, the author was banned from the International Congress of the Spanish Language for allegedly suggesting that they should scrap their focus on spelling, which he called “that terror visited on human beings from the cradle onwards.”

In his 2008 biography of García Márquez, Gerald Martin revealed that the author has been suffering from progressive memory loss—no doubt a serious problem for a man who calls himself a “professional rememberer.” Martin writes, “It seemed clear to me that he could no longer write books.”

And then there are García Márquez’s own statements. In 2006, he told the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia, “I have stopped writing. Last year was the first in my life in which I haven’t written even a line.” Yet recent reports contradict that. When the Colombian paper El Tiempo called the 82-year-old author this spring to ask if the rumor of his retirement was true, García Márquez replied, “Not only is it not true, but the only thing I do is write.” He concluded by saying, “I’ll know when the cakes I am baking are ready.”

Write What You Know

Many of the scenes in Gabriel García Márquez’s novels come straight out of his own strange life. Here are a few examples.

The Little Girl Who Eats Dirt
When he was 3 years old, García Márquez’s little sister Margarita moved in with Gabito and his grandparents. She refused to speak or eat, and the family wondered how she didn’t starve. It wasn’t long before they discovered the answer—she’d been sustaining herself on dirt from the garden and the whitewash off the walls. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the orphan character Rebeca does the same thing when she moves in with the Buendia family. She eventually gets better, just like Margarita did, once she “surrendered to family life.”

Death by Gold Cyanide
At the beginning of Love in the Time of Cholera, the aged Dr. Juvenal Urbino is called to the scene of a suicide. The victim is a crippled war veteran who has killed himself using gold cyanide vapors. García Márquez witnessed a similar death firsthand. As a child, his grandfather brought him to meet “the Belgian,” a World War I veteran who’d lost the use of his legs. The image of the man—his crutches laid neatly next to his cot and his Great Dane lying dead next to him—was recreated in detail in the novel’s opening scene.

The Banana Plantation Massacre
One of the more shocking passages in One Hundred Years of Solitude describes the massacre of 3,000 men, women, and children during a workers’ strike at the Macondo banana plantation. There was, in fact, such a plantation near García Márquez’s childhood home in Aracataca, and he grew up hearing about a massacre that supposedly happened when he was an infant. No one seemed sure how many people died (1,000 or 3,000), but the official government record, which was suspect for several reasons, showed only nine deaths. In the novel, the government denies the event altogether.

The Solace of Little Gold Fish
The Colonel, García Márquez’s beloved grandfather, was also trained in metallurgy and spent many years as a jeweler, crafting small gold fish that became a symbol of his family. Those same fish, crafted by Colonel Aureliano Buendia, make a memorable appearance in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The Mark of Ash Wednesday
One of García Márquez’s most vivid childhood memories was one Ash Wednesday when the illegitimate sons of his grandfather visited his family with crosses of ash still on their foreheads. This visceral image inspired the 17 illegitimate sons of Colonel Aureliano Buendia and their mysterious assassinations. Each of them died after being identified by the permanent mark of the cross on their foreheads.

This article originally appeared in the Nov-Dec 2009 issue of mental_floss magazine.

Marie Antoinette’s first child was a girl, named Marie Thérèse after Marie’s mother. When she was born on December 9, 1778, Marie Antoinette suffered a convulsive fit and collapsed, not surprising after 12 hours of labor in her stuffy room and the possibly dangerous incompetence of her doctor. The Queen wasn’t informed the sex of the child until hours later. But when she woke, she reportedly said, “Poor little girl, you are not what was desired, but you are no less dear to me on that account. A son would have been property of the state. You shall be mine.” There certainly would have been witnesses to the episode: Court custom at the time dictated that queens gave birth in full view of their courtiers.

Louis Joseph, the King’s male heir and the next Dauphin of France, was born three years later, followed by Louis Charles in March of 1785 and Sophie in July of 1786. But Sophie, who was born premature, died just a month shy of her first birthday, and Louis Joseph, who’d been a delicate child most of his life, died two years later, at the age of 7, likely from tuberculosis.

Revolution

While Marie was fulfilling her wifely duties and setting fashion trends in the court at Versailles, France was starving. While Louis XVI continued to send money abroad to support the Americans in the American Revolution, France’s national debt exploded; taxes grew, settling most unfairly on the poor; and rampant unemployment combined with poor crops meant that by the late 1780s, France was a powder keg of dissension, anger and resentment. And Marie, with her courtly ways, detached Austrian air, and unfortunate proclivity for spending masses of money, became the scapegoat.

On July 14, 1789, the fuse was lit with the storming of the Bastille; by October, Marie, her husband and her two surviving children were removed from Versailles and moved to the Tuileries in Paris, placed under house arrest. In 1792, the King was deposed and the family was imprisoned in the Temple in Marais.

Louis XVI was executed on January 21, 1793; Marie followed 10 months later, on October 16. On June 8, 1795, their son, the Dauphin and the boy royalists had named Louis XVII, died at the age of 10, most likely of tuberculosis exacerbated by his brutal prison conditions.

Marie Thérèse: The Survivor

Now Marie Thérèse, the oldest of Marie Antoinette’s children, was a true orphan. Her parents killed, her brothers and sisters all dead, she was left for a time alone in the Temple prison, before being released at the age of 17 in December of 1795. Soon after, she was married to the Duc d’Angoulême, nephew to the new King, the self-styled Louis XVIII, and now heir to the throne of France. As the Duchesse d’Angoulême, however, her life did not improve: Her marriage was an unhappy one and never consummated, the tragic circumstances of her early life had left her bitter and angry, and she was to spend most of her life exiled from France. She had not inherited her mother’s famed beauty — she suffered from bad teeth, a red face, and a rather masculine build — or her grace, though for a time, as her husband’s claim on the throne became even more assured, she bore her mother’s title: Madame la Dauphine.

In 1830, Marie Thérèse technically did achieve the title of Queen of France — for about 20 minutes, long enough for her husband the Duc to sign the abdication papers.

She died in October 1851, at the age 72, still in exile. In her last testament, she forgave those who’d made her life so miserable, following, she said, the example of her parents.

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