Remember back in high school when you had to read those literary classics that may have seemed so stiff and dull when they were a part of your reading list? Well after reading our

collection of sexual fetishes of famous authors, you may want to revisit those required books with a new appreciation for the closet pervert behind the masterpiece. The truth is that some of the most revered authors were also some of the freakiest. Don’t believe us – check out what we were able to dig up.

F Scott Fitzgerald

Reading The Great Gatsby is a rite of passage for many high school students. For others it becomes a bit of a chore considering what a different world the book paints. But the excess depicted in his tribute to the swinging 20s was nothing compared to his own excess. Fitzgerald was known for his wild ways and it later emerged that he had a raging foot fetish. He was known to routinely hire prostitutes simply to admire their feet.

Lord Byron

Students who study poetry quickly learn about Lord Byron as he was a major contributor to the Renaissance era of literature and is the author of the infamous poem “She Walks in Beauty”. While modern day women swoon over his lyrical use of language, women at the time were swooning over something very different. Byron was a self-confessed and wholly unapologetic sex addict, sleeping with hundreds of women e very year. He was also rumoured to have bedded his own half-sister and, considering how quickly he went through women, it was really only a matter of time.

René Descartes

Descartes had a fetish that was strange in its day and remains outside the mainstream even today, if only because it’s so incredibly specific. According to his own writings, Descartes had a fetish for cross-eyed women. With a fetish that specific, it comes as no surprise to learn he dedicated some time writing about it, including sharing how the fetish began. “I loved a girl of my own age, who was slightly cross-eyed; by which means, the impression made in my brain when I looked at her wandering eyes was joined so much to that which also occurred when the passion of love moved me … I felt more inclined to love them than others, simply because they had that defect; and I did not know that was the reason.”

James Joyce

Joyce had a number of various fetishes and made no apologies about enjoying sex in all its various forms. But one fetish was revealed when letters to his wife were published that had even his most hard-core fans scratching their heads. As it turns out, James Joyce harboured a pretty intense fart fetish. When writing about the virtues of his wife, Nora’s, flatulence, he noted “I think I would know Nora’s fart anywhere. I think I could pick hers out in a roomful of farting women.” At the time he wrote this he still had ambitions on where he wanted to go with his fetish, however. He adds “I hope Nora will let off no end of her farts in my face so that I may know their smell also.”

Marquis de Sade

Of course the title of Fetish King still belongs to the original Master – the Marquis de Sade. To be fair, his love for fetishes bordered and sometimes went well beyond what most people would consider extreme. One of his more famous quotes is that “sex without pain is like food without taste” which sums up his approach to sexuality pretty well. Sade was into both receiving and dishing out pain and punishment making him one of the world’s most well-known and extensively documented Switches.