zeogold: So, how did Mickey Spillane succeeded & how did he make all that money? By selling misogynistic crime pulps?
So, how did Beverly Clearly succeeded & how did she make all that money? By selling kids' books with shallow plots?
So, how did Shel Silverstein succeeded & how did he make all that money? By selling puns with scratchy drawings?
LootHunter: Who are those people?
Mickey Spillane was basically the most prolific and successful pulp author ever. He wrote stories featuring Mike Hammer, a hardboiled private eye who fills pretty much every stereotype you can think of for the "hardboiled private eye" trope. Spillane helped to invent or at least pretty much trademark those tropes. He was always panned for having shallow, trope-filled plots full of sex and violence, but he sold well and the money was pretty much all he cared about. Sort of the Michael Bay of writing.
Beverly Clearly is known most for her Ramona and Beezus series of kids' books. She's repeatedly been called one of the most successful authors of all time, won a crapton of awards, and is cited as one of the first kids' authors to use emotional realism in her characters that her readers could relate to rather than your run-of-the-mill moral tales or fantasy stories.
Shel Silverstein was a humorist who did poems, cartoons, and (though lesser-known) songs ("Cover of the Rolling Stone", despite being sung by Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show, is by him). He's particularly known for three collections of poems called Falling Up, Where the Sidewalk Ends, and The Light in the Attic. While these got marketed as children's books, they were universally popular among kids and adults alike (in fact, I highly recommend them) due to their large amounts of wit combined with humorous artwork to go with each poem (the art sometimes forming the punchline).
zeogold: I've read everything from ancient philosophy to early 1900s political satire to to Batman comics to obscure religious accounts nobody cares about that I needed a dictionary and Wikipedia on-hand for just to wade through and I just finished kids' book "Coraline" but a month ago.
Sabin_Stargem: You might want to check out Princess Tutu. The premise is basically "What if these people realized that they were characters in a story?"
Also, the first three Ace Attorney games have been released on Steam as a compilation. I truly recommend them, as the writing is quite amusing.
Never heard of Princess Tutu, but I've played almost all of the Ace Attorney games, including the Professor Layton crossover. I still need to pick up the 6th game one of these days.