Random Geniuses Who Vanished or Went Into Hiding (10 items)

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  (#3) J. D. Salinger

  • Dec. at 91 (1919-2010)

  No list of reclusive geniuses would be complete without Catcher in the Rye author JD Salinger, who famously left Manhattan in 1953 to live on a “90-acre compound” in Cornish, NH. He remained there until his death in 2010, at age 91.

  Salinger's most famous character, Rye protagonist Holden Caulfield, wanted to live in “a little cabin somewhere with the dough [he] made and live there for the rest of [his] life,” far from “any goddam stupid conversation with anybody.” If Caulfield was speaking for Salinger, the author got his wish, for the most part. In his first year in Cornish, he let local kids interview him for the “High School” section of the local paper, but the editors instead gave the interview prominence as a feature. Feeling betrayed, Salinger built a six-and-a-half feet fence around his property.

  Salinger broke his legendary silence in 1973, speaking to the New York Times about his attempts to prevent his uncollected stories from being published without his consent: “Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.”
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  (#9) Beverley Thorne

  • 95

  Architect David Thorne received so much attention for his work on jazz giant Dave Brubeck’s house in 1954, he changed his professional name in the ‘60s, got an unlisted phone number, and didn’t “resurface” until the ‘80s. Brubek’s mid-century modern house in Oakland was considered a brilliant early example of the dramatic, steel-supported homes that would later fill the Hollywood hills.

  Tired of attention from rich developers and “crooks,” Thorne changed his professional name to Beverley Thorne and largely dropped out of sight, quietly doing work that went largely unheralded. In the ‘80s, his profile increased on account of work he did in Hawaii. By 2006, he once again began speaking openly about his 1950s work.
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  (#6) Barbara Newhall Follett

  • Dec. at 25 (1914-1939)

  Child prodigy Barbara Newhall Follett disappeared in 1939, at age 26, following a fight with her husband. She has never been seen again. Follett famously authored a novel, The House Without Windows, at age 12. It garnered near-unanimous praise. Anne Carroll Moore, of the New York Herald Tribune, found the story “exquisite,” but wrote, “I can conceive of no greater handicap for the writer between the ages of 19 and 39 than to have published a successful book between the age of nine and 12.” Moore wondered what price young Follett would “pay for her ‘big days’ at the typewriter?”

  Follett authored follow-up The Voyage of the Norman D. the next year (“a fine, sustained, and vivid piece of writing”—The Saturday Review), but the week before publication, her father left her and her mother to live with a younger woman. Follett found work as a typist to make up for the income her father took with him. By age 20, she had written two more books, but had no editor and no high school diploma, making it hard to find work.

  Follett married outdoorsman Nickerson Rogers in '34, and found happiness backpacking through Europe and taking dance classes. But in 1939, she wrote to a friend that Nick was cheating on her. On December 7, she disappeared forever, just the character Eepersip from The House Without Windows. Rogers later said he expected her to return, which is why it took him weeks to tell police. The media didn’t learn about Follett’s disappearance until 1966, because Rogers didn’t list her maiden name in the missing person report.
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  (#5) Chaim Soutine

  • Dec. at 50 (1893-1943)

  Chaim Soutine, an acclaimed Russian Expressionist painter of Belarusian-Jewish origin, vanished from Paris and the public eye in 1941 to escape the Gestapo. For two years, he traveled, battling a stomach ulcer, with his girlfriend Marie-Berthe Aurenche, sleeping in forests, bouncing from hotel-to-hotel, constantly changing accommodations to avoid detection.

  The art world discovered his whereabouts in 1943, after Aurenche took more than 24 hours to stealthily drive him 200 miles back to Paris for treatment for his ulcer (they did not trust any local doctors where they were hiding). Soutine died of internal bleeding on August 9, 1943.

  Known best for his vivid paintings of animal carcasses, Soutine’s work was wildly popular in New York during the ‘30s and ‘40s. He was championed as a genius by Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani (responsible for the portrait of Soutine above) as early as 1917, but his work didn’t find acclaim until a prominent American collector purchased all of his work at once in 1922 (now permanently on display at a museum in Merion, PA).
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  (#4) Thomas Pynchon

  • 81

  Like JD Salinger before him, author Thomas Pynchon is one of the world’s most famous reclusive literary geniuses, except Pynchon has maintained a relatively steady output of novels (Against the Day, Inherent Vice, Bleeding Edge) and even film adaptations (Inherent Vice) since his long, post-Gravity’s Rainbow drought in the ‘70s. Despite this, there are only four known photographs of Pynchon in circulation.

  Gravity’s Rainbow earned Pynchon a Pulitzer consideration in 1974 (overruled by the advisory board for being “turgid” and “obscene”), and the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1975, which he declined via letter: “The Howells Medal is a great honor, and, being gold, probably a good hedge against inflation, too. But I don't want it. Please don't impose on me something I don't want.”

  Pynchon has successfully remained out of the public eye his entire career, but he appeared, oddly enough, three times on The Simpsons in animated form. He even sent Executive Producer Matt Selman feedback on his first appearance, cutting a line where he calls Homer a “fat ass.” Pynchon wrote to Selman, “Homer is my role model and I can’t speak ill of him.”
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  (#2) William James Sidis

  • Dec. at 46 (1898-1944)

  Proto-Doogie Howser William James Sidis (1898-1944) was an impossibly gifted lad: he could reportedly read the New York Times before he was two, knew several languages at six, and even invented his own language before being accepted into Harvard at age 11. The Wes Anderson-character-come-to-life had other interests, too, including writing French poetry, novels, and “a constitution for a utopia.”

  But it was his astounding math skills that really wowed the grown-ups at Harvard, where he lectured, at age 11, on four-dimensional bodies. He graduated cum laude at age 16, but never really used his degree. After toiling in grad school, law school, and a professorship, Sidis went into hiding, bouncing from job-to-job and city-to-city, seeking to become a “regular working man.”

  He wrote the occasional odd book, often using pseudonyms, including a book all about streetcar tickets under the name Frank Folupa, which his biographer calls "arguably the most boring book ever written." In 1937, he successfully sued the New Yorker for writing a sneaky piece about him he thought “made him sound crazy.” He died in 1944 from a brain hemorrhage, the same thing that killed his father.

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