The Original Hipsters: Five Classic Literary Rebels 

From left to right: Walt Whitman, Francoise Sagan, Christopher Marlowe, Jean Rhys, Arthur Rimbaud

If You’ve Never Heard of Penelope Fitzgerald, Stay a While and Listen

All Credit to Canterbury Tales, But it Wasn’t Chaucer’s Best Poem

The much-maligned hipster -- that ubiquitous cultural annoyance, who seems convinced of his or her superiority -- might seem like a product of the modern world, but in fact, he (or she) has a long literary history. Our favorite five literary hipsters are a diverse bunch, less famous for their beards and penchant for pickling than for their outsider status and their refusal to play nice with the establishment. They usually burst onto the scene as young upstarts and moved in like-minded circles of friends, rivals, and lovers. They rarely settled down or softened with age, and their works remain abrasive, unsettling, and revolutionary to this day.

While there\'s a case to be made that Shakespeare created the original literary hipster in the disaffected and misunderstood Hamlet, his friend Christopher Marlowe -- author of the bloody masterpieces

has a better claim to hipster hero status. Little is known for sure about Marlowe\'s life and his violent death, but he was both a renowned poet and probably a spy, and he espoused a doctrine of sexual and religious freedom that was deeply disturbing to those in power.

 digs deep into what we know about the man and his time, illuminating the unstable world of Elizabethan England and the playwright\'s danger-seeking life. And although we don\'t know for sure that it\'s actually of Marlowe, the most commonly attributed portrait shows him with folded arms, a raised eyebrow, and a distinctly skeptical expression -- not to mention neatly sculpted facial hair, for the authentic 16th-century hipster look.

Leaping a couple of centuries, we arrive at the patron saint of Brooklyn hipsters, Walt Whitman, who struggled to make ends meet while writing poetry and cultivating a lush beard. His earthy, free-spirited and boldly sexual poetry shocked his early readers, and the Whitman who stares out from the portrait in the front of the first edition of

with his rakishly angled hat and baggy shirt unbuttoned at the collar, could stroll quite comfortably through the streets of modern Williamsburg.

Belonging to an impossibly cool clique is par for the hipster course, and Whitman\'s co-ed group included actors, comedians, writers and performers who self-consciously embodied European bohemianism in America. Justin Martin\'s lively group biography

 tells the story of this group and their counter-cultural gatherings at Manhattan\'s Pfaff\'s Saloon. No doubt the beer came from a local craft brewery.

No true literary hipster should be entirely successful in his own lifetime, and the flamboyant French poet Arthur Rimbaud died in appropriate obscurity. Yet in Graham Robb\'s biography, the self-destructive hero of the avant garde appears as a unique creative spirit, whose short life left an extraordinary legacy.

Thoroughly rejecting his bourgeois upbringing, Rimbaud grew his hair, started drinking, moved to Paris and began his legendary affair with the poet Verlaine that was fueled by passion and plenty of absinthe, and ended when the older man shot Rimbaud in the wrist. The young poet gave up writing in his early twenties, traveled extensively and eventually settled in Ethiopia, where he established the country\'s coffee trade with Europe. Rimbaud died of cancer at the age of just thirty-seven, going on to achieve posthumous fame as the archetypal "enfant terrible" and patron saint of particularly badly behaved hipsters.

A stint in Paris is de rigueur for past and present literary hipsters, and the Caribbean-born British writer Jean Rhys lived for several years in the city as she established herself as a writer and struggled through a series of personal tragedies. Her outsider sensibilities gave her a unique perspective on expat Paris life, and her early stories brilliantly capture  the loneliness of young modern women\'s lives.

 Lilian Pizzichini brings the troubled novelist movingly to life, recounting her lifelong battle with alcoholism, her three marriages, the deaths of her two children, and her late literary fame with the novel

, published in 1966, almost forty years after her first stories appeared in print.

The modern embodiment of detached cool and uniquely French hipster-dom might be Cécile, of Francoise Sagan\'s classic novel

 set during a hazy summer on the Riviera as the teenage heroine discovers sex and tests the limits of her power over her playboy father.

Her creator, Francoise Sagan, was eighteen when the novel was published in 1954, and became instantly identified with her amoral heroine.

With her pixie haircut and her devilish grin, she seemed the picture of a particularly French kind of insouciance, and became an international star when the scandal around her book boosted its sales to astronomical levels. She married twice and divorced quickly both times, and had relationships with men and women throughout her life; terrible with money, she loved fast cars, drink and drugs, and never quite matched the success of her debut. That novel, a shimmering distillation of glamorous bad behavior, tells her story better than any biography.

‘The World of Raymond Chandler’ Captures the Strange Magic of L.A. In his new book, \'The World of Raymond Chandler,\' Barry Day capture\'s the writer\'s alien perspective on Los Angeles.

James McParland Goes Undercover to Become America’s Sherlock Holmes Some time in 1969, writer Beau Riffenburgh, still in high school, went to see Robert Redford and Paul Newman in...

Brooke Shields Writes of Drowning in Her Mother’s Addiction to Booze Brooke Shields\'s new memoir, There Was a Little Girl, is full of these kinds of stories, where the movie biz and...

The Assault of Laughter: 13 Perfectly Sardonic Mark Twain Quotes Honor Mark Twain\'s birthday with some of his most chuck-worthy commentary.

The Charlie Browniest: 25 Abiding Charles M. Schulz Quotes Celebrate the birth of Charles M. Schulz by assembling some of our favorite quotes from Schulz and his best Peanut...

Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down: 10 Fiery Margaret Atwood Quotes This week in history, Margaret Atwood turns 75. Celebrate with this collection of rousing -- and surprisingly upbeat--...

‘Sentimental Journeys:’ Joan Didion on Class Contradictions in NYC Put a candle on a cupcake, wish Ms. Didion a very happy eightieth, and, as a present to yourself, read "Sentimental...

Failing Words: The Norman Mailer-Gore Vidal Feud, Outlined in Letters A new compilation of Mailer’s extensive correspondence, Selected Letters of Norman Mailer, grants all new insights...

Untangling the Enigma of Alan Turing In the news this week: New Richard Pryor biography hits stores, revealing Q&A from Alan Turing biographer Andrew...