Aspies For Freedom

I hope I don't seem ungrateful for help in identifying more "famous aspies". For my main list I will only include names of people who have had something pretty credible published about them being AS or autistic or claiming to be autistic, such as a book, biographical details on a pretty credible looking internet reference data base, radio show recording or transcript, article in a reputable online magazine/journal, an article in a current affairs journal (Newsweek, Time etc) or a newspaper article, professional or medical journal etc.
tle party!

As Roald Dahl: A Biography, Jeremy Treglown's marvelously supple and illuminating book, so nimbly demonstrates, Dahl, who died in 1990 at the age of 74, was a man of many contradictions: a Tory who loved to subvert authority, a misanthrope who found optimism in adversity, a shameless self–promoter who enjoyed giving money to worthy causes. "He was famously a war hero, a connoisseur, a philanthropist, a devoted family man who had to confront an appalling succession of tragedies," writes Mr. Treglown. "He was also, as will be seen, a fantasist, an anti–Semite, a bully and a self–publicizing troublemaker."

In the words of a longtime Dahl family friend: "Almost anything you could say about him would be true. It depended which side he decided to show you."

World War II enabled Dahl to live out some of his dreams: first, as a fighter pilot for the Royal Air Force (he is credited with having shot down five enemy airplanes), and later as a sometime spy for British intelligence in Washington. The experiences, this biography contends, gave him plenty of material on which to exercise his self–mythologizing imagination, and they also helped galvanize the darker aspects of his sensibility. "It can't have helped that in Washington he was professionally encouraged to practice opportunism, duplicity, entrapment," writes Mr. Treglown. "It is not far from these to the cynicism of his postwar short stories."

Storytelling began, it seems, as a way for Dahl to monopolize attention at parties; it was a way, says Mr. Treglown, for "assessing, and sometimes dominating, his listener." With the series of personal tragedies that overtook Dahl's adult life – his son was seriously injured in a car accident, his oldest daughter died of measles and his first wife, the actress Patricia Neal, suffered a debilitating stroke at the age of 38 – storytelling assumed another meaning as well. By creating a succession of children's books featuring wizards, magicians and real heroes, Mr. Treglown implies, Dahl was able to enact his own fantasies of being "powerful enough to be able to conquer illness and other misfortunes."

In the real world, of course, storytelling served more practical ends as well: as sales of his children's stories escalated into the millions, Dahl became a wealthy and famous author. According to Mr. Treglown, Dahl reveled in his business success and began campaigning in vain for a knighthood. He dispensed highly mythologized versions of his own life, even conducting a self–serving interview with himself.

As depicted in these pages, Dahl emerges as a difficult, sometimes impossible man. He bullied Ms. Neal and his children, and dealt cavalierly with the editors on whose suggestions he depended. He was also a blatant anti–Semite, arguing that "even a stinker like Hitler" hadn't picked on Jews "for no reason."

What about musicians? There are so many genuinely eccentric ones that I'm surprised not to see any candidates listed yet.