Victor Hugo wrote Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, two of the biggest tearjerkers in French literature. But his own life could have filled a few scandalous novels of its own, and honestly, it almost makes his fiction look tame by comparison. Between affairs, arrests, a secret diary written in a code his own family couldn't crack, and a funeral that reportedly shut down every brothel in Paris for the day, Hugo lived like a man determined to out drama his own boo

In July 1925, a small courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee, became the unlikely stage for one of the strangest legal spectacles in American history. A 24 year old football coach was put on trial for teaching Charles Darwin's theory of evolution to his students, and within days the case had ballooned into a full blown circus, complete with chimpanzees in fedoras, hot dog stands, and a national radio audience hanging on every word. The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, bette

Steve McQueen spent most of his career being the coolest man on any screen. He was the guy doing his own stunts in Bullitt, jumping the fence in The Great Escape (or at least getting the credit for it), and turning up to a three-week LIFE magazine shoot looking like he'd been born in sunglasses. Less than two decades after that shoot, he was checking into a small Mexican hospital under a fake name, weighing a fraction of his usual weight, and hoping a dentist with a revoked l