Despite a new book promoting Mark Twain as your ideal investment mentor, he was just another highly intelligent writer who was transformed into an idiot when he was managing money. There are exceptions, but not many: Literary figures screw up when it comes to handling money. Honore de Balzac found time to produce more than 100 novels but also time to blow his huge earnings on gambling, insanely wild extravagances and worthless Sardinian silver mines—and spent many moons hiding from his creditors. Both Fyodor Dos-toyevsky and Leo Tolstoy also had gambling problems and, until Tolstoy hit it big with War and Peace and Anna Karenina, he was paying for his roulette losses by selling off chunks of the land he had inherited. During his peak years as a writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald lived in a basically tax-free world and averaged about $165,000 a year in today's dollars, but was chronically unable to get through the month without borrowing from his literary agent or, on occasion, his mother. A secretary charged with putting Scott and his wife on a budget said despairingly, "Their idea of economy was to cut the laundress' wage." Tom Clancy blew a fast $2 million after taking a liking to a plausible-seeming swindler he had just met in a box seat at a Baltimore Orioles game. Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley inherited wealth, which he rapidly dissipated by lending money to his deadbeat bo-hemian friends.
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机译：尽管有一本新书提倡马克·吐温（Mark Twain）为您理想的投资导师，但他只是另一位非常有才华的作家，在他管理资金时变成了白痴。有例外，但不是很多：在处理金钱方面，文学数字搞砸了。奥诺·德·巴尔扎克（Honore de Balzac）抽出时间创作了100多本小说，但也有时间将自己的巨额收入用于赌博，疯狂的奢侈奢侈和毫无价值的撒丁岛银矿上，并花了许多月亮躲避债权人。费奥多尔·多斯·托维斯基（Fyodor Dos-toyevsky）和托尔斯泰（Leo Tolstoy）都存在赌博问题，直到托尔斯泰因《战争与和平》和《安娜·卡列尼娜》（Ana and Karenina）大获成功之前，他都通过出售自己继承的土地来弥补轮盘赌损失。 F.斯科特·菲茨杰拉德（F.Scott Fitzgerald）在其写作高峰期间生活在一个基本免税的世界中，按今天的美元计算，平均每年约为16.5万美元，但长期以来，如果没有从他的文学经纪人那里借钱，或者有时候，他的母亲。一位负责将斯科特和他的妻子列入预算的秘书绝望地说道：“他们的经济思想是削减女工的工资。”汤姆·克兰西（Tom Clancy）喜欢上一个他在巴尔的摩金莺游戏中的方块座位上遇到过的貌似骗子的骗子，就因此迅速地赚了200万美元。浪漫主义诗人珀西·比希·雪莱（Percy Bysshe Shelley）继承了财富，他通过将钱借给残酷的波西米亚朋友而迅速消散。
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