Has a respected author ever written something truly cynical and

For example, Yukio Mishima wrote chatty articles for women's magazines.

William Faulkner apparently did Hollywood scripts.

Has there ever been a case of these cash-ins coming back to haunt an author?

>>9475970
Dickens and other 19th century authors who wrote for serials made careers of it.

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opus pistorum

>The following is an affidavit filed by Milton Luboviski at the United States Embassy in Paris on March 10,
1983 affirming the circumstances under which he commissioned Henry Miller to write Opus Pistorum:
In the summer of 1940, I was a partner in the Larry Edmunds Bookshop at 1603 North Chuenga
Boulevard in Hollywood, California. In September of that year, Henry Miller arrived at the bookshop on a
Sunday afternoon when the shop was closed. He knocked on the door, introduced himself and I
admitted him to the shop. That began a friendship which lasted some thirty-five years or so. At that
time, Henry had little or no money and knew very few people in California. I befriended him, helping him
with money from time to time, introducing him to people and, at one point, finding him a place to live.
On September 1, 1941 Larry Edmunds died and I became sole owner of the bookshop. In those days the
shop was not doing well and I supplemented our income by selling various items of pornography
whenever it was possible to obtain them. My customers were mainly studio producers, writers and
directors such as Joseph Mankiewicz, Julian Johnson, Daniele Amfitheatrof, Billy Wilder, Frederick
Hollander, Henry Blanke, and others.
Henry, being in need of money, offered to write material for me that I would be able to sell. I offered to
pay him one dollar per page in return for all rights to the material he would write for me. Shortly
thereafter he began to bring in several pages at a time and I paid him in cash at the agreed rate. Within
a few months the pages had accumulated into a complete book which he entitled Opus Pistorum.
When he gave me the last pages, around the middle of 1942, I recall his saying "Here is the end of the
book. I hope you make a few months' rent from it."
I retyped the entire manuscript, making four carbon copies. I then had all five copies bound by a book
binder and, thereafter, sold copies to Julian Johnson, Daniele Amfitheatrof and Frederick Hollander. A
few years later, I gave a copy to my friend, Robert Light, and kept the original for myself.

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And yet, a year after Likhachev arrived at Solovki, he and his fellow-prisoners learned that Maxim Gorky, perhaps the most popular Soviet writer of the time, was coming to visit. Here, at last, was their witness and savior. Gorky was a hero to Russians, not merely for his prose but also for his proletarian authenticity, his adventures as an urchin and a juvenile delinquent, described in “Childhood” and “The Lower Depths.” Now Gorky’s ship, the Gleb Boky, named for the camp chief, was about to dock at Solovki. “All we prisoners were delighted,” Likhachev wrote. “ ‘That Gorky will spot everything, find out everything. He’s been around, you can’t fool him. About the logging and the torture on the tree-stumps, the hunger, the disease, the three-tier bunks, those without clothes, the sentences without conviction.’ “

For the occasion, the Solovki administration had spruced up the camp, painted walls, planted trees, allowed husbands and wives to be together (as they never were ordinarily). And, as it turned out, Gorky failed to see beyond the façade that had been erected for him. He seemed disinclined to try. He visited the punishment cells and, after a few short minutes, pronounced them “excellent.” He spent hardly any time at all with prisoners, though he did speak for forty minutes with a young boy and declared himself fascinated and pleased. (After Gorky left the camp, Likhachev writes, that boy was never seen again.) The writer stayed for three days and spent nearly all of it with the secret-police officers who ran the complex.

The Soviet leadership could hardly complain about the essay that Gorky eventually wrote about his experience: “There is no impression of life being over-regulated. No, there is no resemblance to a prison; instead it seems as if these rooms are inhabited by passengers rescued from a drowned ship.” The political prisoners at Solovki—men like Likhachev—were, according to Gorky, merely “counter-revolutionaries, emotional types, monarchists.” It is hard to know to what degree the censors shaped Gorky’s thoughts, but the text certainly suggests a man well satisfied with Soviet conditions and Soviet kindness. “If any so-called cultured European society dared to conduct an experiment such as this colony,” he wrote, “and if this experiment yielded fruits as ours had, that country would blow all its trumpets and boast about its accomplishments.”

After Gorky left Solovki, the guards began a round of mass executions. “The graves had been dug a day before the shootings,” Likhachev recalled. “The executioners were drunk. One bullet per victim. Many were buried alive, just a thin layer of earth over them. In the morning, the earth on the pit was still moving. . . . The camp had been cleared of ‘superfluous’ persons.”

>>9476268
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/04/14/seasons-in-hell-4

>>9476268
I kind of had writing genre fiction in mind, not so much negligent totalitarian journalism.