You have to question what of the person filtered through to their works.

As a teen I voraciously read my way through the Belgariad, and later the Malloreon, Elenium and the Tamuli.

Shocked to learn that Eddings and his wife were both convicted and jailed for child abuse prior to writing those novels.

I still like those books, and, for some reason, that didn't affect me. Other people, however, have. Science fiction/fantasy has a long, turgid history of weird and unsavory authors. I tend to ignore that.

I think books have a firewall between the author and the characters on the page. Actors, however, are a different matter. They are the medium.

The AI is incorrect. Lovecraft's views largely reflected the white societal norm, particularly the "scientific racism" of time, and they softened considerably near the end of his life. His letters from the time mention that several of his earlier depictions of race were unfair. If he hadn't died so young I suspect we would have seen a very significant shift in his views.

And, for me, it recontextualizes a lot of his writing knowing his racism. Who he thought "the other" was and how they appeared in his work is colored by who he thought the other was in real life.

Related, I read Lovecraft for the first time a while back and the xenophobia was so overt it was almost humorous.

The story was basically a police detective uncovering ritual cult activity by immigrants (from some unspecified place) in a NY slum. And the narrator (the detective) goes on and on about these strange foreigners and their dark skin, weird languages, heathen religions, etc.

But it only occurred to me after finishing that, though the reader is told from the start that weird cult stuff will ensue, the detective doesn't actually find anything nefarious until pretty late in the story. So with the story's timeline it's mostly just a cop being suspicious of foreigners for being foreign, until many months later he suddenly discovers unspeakable horrors of etc. etc.

You may be interested in the novella "The Ballad of Black Tom", which is a re-telling of "The Horror at Red Hook" from the perspective of the immigrants in the New York slum, and why they decide that maybe dealing with eldritch horrors is a better alternative than trying to reason with this detective that keeps on hassling them for no reason.

What am amazing premise for a story, thanks for the tip!

> AI tells me

You are using AI to form personal opinions?

<speechless>

The AI provided me links and a summary to Wikipedia and Blogs and Reddit posts. No different than any other google search would reveal.

I stopped after Malloreon more because my interests changed. Finding out their history hasn’t changed anything for me. But Marion Zimmerman Bradley for some reason has and I have no desire to read any of her books ever again.

I stopped reading Eddings because after a while I realized that all of these fun, bantering characters I so enjoyed were (except for Garion, mostly) truly awful people and that I didn't want to spend any more time with them. That was after I'd re-read them many times, and long before any revelations about the author. (Really, Polgara? Your reaction to being balked is to smash everything in sight? You haven't matured at all in your vastly long life?)

As for MZB, I agree completely. No desire at all.

WRT to O'Brian, though--it's clear, as the OP notes, that he knew his faults, recognizes them in his characters, particularly Maturin, and shows them for what they are. To put it another way, his faults don't "poison" his books from within.

Silk was always a bad person, but had the best dialog.

In the Sparhawk series, Faran was the likeable character.

I read Atlas Shrugged recently. I went in not knowing anything about the book or author. I liked it for maybe half way through and despised it by the end. Reading about the author after finishing the book, it had a lot of her personality in it.