Authors Howard Phillips Lovecraft and possibly J.R.R. Tolkein, I think. In both cases their freinds described them as having annoying, droning, monotonous, "pedantic" and "nasal" voices, and neither seemed very comfortable in crowds, and both seemed to prefer isolation and their own fantasy creations. Lovecraft for certain seemed to prefer communicating by letter than face-to-face; he also suffered a "nervous breakdown" at a young age which prevented him from finishing school and which drove him to seclusion in his family home; Lovecraft would never hold a regular job his entire life. Tolkien supported himself by lecturing at college, a job he evidently hated and dreaded as much as the students who could frequently be found dozing through Tolkein's monotonous lectures on subjects that only Tolkein seemed to be interested in. Common criticisms of the works of both writers seem like they could just as easily have been written about Aspies: characters are infamously "emotionless" and "shallow", dialogue, where present, tended to be a bit un-natural and stilted, favoring a very formal lecturing style; and the extreme and "long-winded" attention to detail on strange subjects (take architecture in Lovecraft's case, and languages in Tolkien's, as only two of several possible examples) suggest the focus-subjects and hobbies typical of Asperger's. Any one of Lovecraft's protagonists, eccentric and distant loners with peculiar hobbies, could be a perfect portrait of an Aspie.
I'd suggest taht probably the infamous Marquis De Sade, too, was somewhere on the Autistic Spectrum... he certainly had other problems, but what I've read of his work again presents startlingly long-winded lectures (even by my standards) and characters almost completely void of any emotional expression whatsoever (even though constantly presented with numerous opportunities to express horror, terror, hatred, and revulsion, their typical response was either of mute shock or a distant philosophical discourse on their situation.) But, more than that, De Sade's stories, The 120 Days of Sodom in particular, consisted of little more than endless lists and catalogues and careful organisations of not just the horrific perversions which seemed to be his focus, but down to insane and seemingly irrelevant details (including tables and charts!) of precisely how many times each character chewed their food and things of that nature. (The bizarre biography of De Sade might, perhaps, be illuminating from the perspective of someone trained to look for Autistic traits, I suspect.)
EDIT: I just remembered that H.P.Lovecraft taught himself to read and write English, Latin, and Greek at an early age as well as chemistry and astronomy, but was a general dis-appointment in school.
Also, I'll add conservative commentator William F. Buckley jr., whose peculiar speaking style and stilted vocabulary usually left an impression that he was pretentious, arrogant, distant, and "nerdy", as a possible Aspie. Also, maybe Thomas Paine, and probably at least a couple of the gentlemen who wrote the United States Constititution (which outlined what I would consider a bizarrely Aspie-friendly government at a time when the majority of Americans were, by all accounts, demanding their own authoritarian king.)
28 Jun 2006, 5:45 pm
