Some of the most renowned authors have been horribly problematic people. Salinger was an adulterer and has been accused of pedophilia. Anne Perry murdered her mother. T.S. Eliot was a raging anti-Semite – as were Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, and Ernest Hemingway. So why is it that we study these author’s texts with such fervent admiration in our English classes, fawn over their prose in our book clubs, and read their works on our own time? The simple answer is that bad people sometimes create great art. Yet the problem with putting so much importance on works by problematic people is that the things they’ve done and said become forgotten…