Controversial Comments
Gertrude Atherton made some controversial comments during her career. However, amongst the most vicious and unprovoked was her shallow and cruel assault on Pio Pico, the last Mexican governor of California. Pio Pico suffered from severe facial disfigurement that may have been due to acromegaly caused by a pituitary tumor. In 1902 Atherton ridiculed Pio Pico's facial disfigurement as follows:
“…an uglier man than Pio Pico rarely had entered this world. The upper lip of his enormous mouth dipped at the middle; the broad thick under lip hung down with its own weight. The nose was big and coarse, although there was a certain spirited suggestion in the cavernous nostrils…”
Her apparent shallow and superficial tendencies to revile and disrespect those people whom she considered physically flawed were consistent with an admission she made in her memoir Adventures of a Novelist (1932), where she reveals that she made an excuse to avoid meeting Oscar Wilde because she thought he was physically repulsive.
Read more about this topic: Gertrude Atherton
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