Validity of Retrospective Diagnoses
Speculation of this sort is, by necessity, based on reported behavior and anecdotal evidence rather than any clinical observation of the individual, and as such, is often controversial. Psychologist and author Oliver Sacks wrote that many of these claims seem "very thin at best", and Fred Volkmar, of the Yale Child Study Center, has remarked that "there is unfortunately a sort of cottage industry of finding that everyone has Asperger's". Fitzgerald's research, in particular, has been heavily criticised, and described by some as "fudged pseudoscience" and "frankly absurd".
Read more about this topic: Historical Figures Sometimes Considered Autistic
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“Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)