The sliding scale of celebrity authorship: three writers face their adoring (and otherwise) public with very different results

This paper examines three authors’ lives in relation to their response to their status as ‘star authors’ (Moran, 2000). All three experienced a meteoric rise to fame as a result of a single work of thinly-veiled if not autobiographical fiction, with this work being widely acclaimed, translated into other languages and perhaps unsurprisingly in the current celebrity obsessed culture, Hollywood films. How these authors negotiated their fame and the subsequent praise and criticism that followed, is the focus of this paper. The three authors are Elizabeth Gilbert, Bret Easton Ellis and Harper Lee.