Recently, we got a huge kick out of Slacktory’s post on what Google Image Search suggests you add to celebrities’ names when you search for them. Inspired, we took to the Internet, trying out the experiment with the names of our own favorite celebrities — who are, ahem, mostly dead authors. As you might expect, we had mixed results: some of the results are right on the money, as succinctly meaningful as Humbert Humbert’s description of his mother’s death “(picnic, lightning),” and others are a little more questionable, or perhaps just slightly random. After all, this is a survey of our collective consciousness as filtered through technology, so you can’t expect too much. Click through to check out what Google thinks you should add to the names of famous authors, and if you happen to go off and do your own experimenting, let us know what you come up with in the comments.
Ernest Hemingway (fishing, hunting, Midnight in Paris)
Sylvia Plath (death, oven, daddy)
J.D. Salinger (old, recent, white people problems)
Franz Kafka (art, child, for president)
George Orwell (cctv, big brother, lived here)
John Cheever (young, short stories, gay)
Anthony Burgess (is America falling apart, wife assaulted)
Mark Twain (national forest, pipe, Tom Sawyer)
Anne Sexton (death, model, and Sylvia Plath)
Dorothy Parker (gin)
Hunter S. Thompson (Johnny Depp, gonzo, wallpaper, funeral)
Ayn Rand (Jesus, valentine, funeral)
William S. Burroughs (junky, gun, danger)
Ken Kesey (bus, magic bus, acid tests)
Ezra Pound (poetry, cake, mugshot)
Mikhail Bulgakov (morphine, and Stalin)
Yukio Mishima (body, severed head, patriotism)
Martin Amis (money, teeth, invasion of the space invaders)
Orson Scott Card (empire, piggies, treason)
Gertrude Stein (Picasso, and Hemingway, and Alice B. Toklas)
J.K. Rowling (new book, hot, and family)
Jonathan Franzen (glasses, girlfriend, time)
Bret Easton Ellis (Twitter, boyfriend, brat pack)
Salman Rushdie (girlfriend, fatwa, wives)
Kingsley Amis (beach, hangover)