I'm probably the last person on the planet to hear about this.
I found out that mystery writer Anne Perry is actually Juliet
Hulme, who at age 15 helped murder her best friend's mother in
New Zealand.  She was played by Kate Winslet in the movie Heavenly
Creatures, which was based on the case.  She spent 5 years in
prison in NZ, then left for England under an assumed identity
("Anne Perry").  This all came to light around the time the
movie was released.  Perry refuses to discuss the case except
to admit that she made a terrible mistake.

Makes me wonder: are there any other writers, past or present,
with skeletons in their closets?

9 responses total.

O Henry, supposedly an embezzler.

  Plenty of writers have scandalous pasts or brushes with the law, though
  in many cases the skeletons are not exactly in their closets..

Right. I guess Poe had a little drinking problem, and Walt Whitman 
might've been gay.  

  And then there's that George Eliot chick..  What's her deal?

Here's a short literary gossip list.  Feel free to add.

Closet case:
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Henry David Thoreau
Walt Whitman
Henry James
A. E. Housman
Elizabeth Bishop
John Cheever

Crazy:
Christopher Smart
Emily Dickinson
Robert Lowell
Delmore Schwartz
Sylvia Plath
John Berryman

Alcoholic:
James Boswell
Edgar Allen Poe
William Faulkner
Ernest Hemingway
James Agee
Philip Larkin

Obnoxious:
Samuel Johnson
Vladimir Nabokov
Robert Frost
Mary McCarthy

Asshole:
Ezra Pound
Lilian Hellman
Anne Sexton
Norman Mailer
Jack Kerouac

  Should we add an "Unusual Suicide" category?  (which begs the question
  of what  a "usual" suicide looks like, but points should be given for
  creativity and style..)

Too much overlap as it is.  There would be even more overlap if there 
was a suicide category.  "Unusual suicide" would be cool, though.  
Berryman: wave goodbye and jump off the bridge.  Sexton: Have a chatty 
lunch with your best friend (Maxine Kumin), no clue anything was amiss 
(more amiss than usual, at any rate), no sense of "goodbye" or aything, 
then go straight home and CO yourself in the garage.

  Was it Virginia Woolf who filled her pockets with rocks and walked into
  a river when the voices got to be too much, or am I getting her confused
  with someone?

Yep, that was she.  

Hemingway's shotgun in the mouth and Plath's head in the oven were 
nothing special.  Hart Crane's distance swim in the Gulf of Mexico was 
pretty unusual, though.

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