Literature

The German-born author of Siddhartha (1922) and Steppenwolf (1927) Hermann Hesse became a Swiss citizen at the outbreak of World War I. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946.

John Newbery (1713-67) of England was one of the first publishers to publish books for children. The Newbery Medal, established in his name in 1921, is awarded each year for the best American children’s book.

Oedipus is crushed by fate in Jean Cocteau’s tragedy The Infernal Machine.

It is generally accepted that the New Testament Gospel of Mark was written before those of Matthew, Luke, and John. The New Testament places them in the order Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

The thirty-second piece Breath by Samuel Beckett has no actors and no dialogue.

The novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez tells the story of seven generations of the Buendia family in the village of Macondo.

Zora Neale Hurston was a folklorist who studied with anthropologist Franz Boas at Barnard College before becoming a novelist. In Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938), she compiled black traditions of the South and the Caribbean. Her novels include Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).

The first sentence of Herman Melville’s Moby Diek was “Call me Ishmael.”

The name of the little boy who goes to the country of the Wild Things in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are is Max.

The A.A. in A. A. Milne stands for Alan Alexander. Milne is best known as the author of Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928).

The “Glad Girl” was Pollyanna, in the eponymous 1913 novel by Eleanor Hodgman Porter. She also appeared in the 1915 sequel, Pollyanna Grows Up.

In a work of art, pathos is the quality that evokes sympathy or sorrow. Bathos evokes only laughter and disgust in its failed attempt to create a grand or pathetic effect.

In Charles Perrault’s original version (1697), the wolf devours Little Red Riding Hood, the “prettiest girl that ever was seen.” In the Brothers Grimm version (1812), called “Little Red Cap,” a hunter cuts open the wolf with a pair of scissors and frees the girl and her grandmother.

The phrase “What hath God wrought” comes from the Bible, Numbers 23:23. It is now best known as the first message sent by telegraph, May 28, 1844.

The source of the title of Thomas Wolfe’s novel Look Homeward, Angel (1929) was John Milton’s poem “Lycidas” (1637). Milton asks his dead friend, now an angel, to look back compassionately on his still-living friends: Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth: And, 0 ye dolphins, waft the hapless youth.

The Mongol emperor Kublai Khan (1215-1294) had a residence in K’ai-p’ing in southeastern Mongolia. Also known as Shang-Tu, this became Xanadu, the site of the emperor’s pleasure garden in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s unfinished poem “Kubla Khan” (1797).

The German word for “overman” or “superperson” first appears in Goethe’s Faust (1808,1833), referring to an extraordinarily gifted person. Nietzsche used the term iibermensch for his transcendent man in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-91). The Nazis adopted the term as part of their doctrine of Aryan supremacy.

Lolita was twelve when Humbert Humbert first met her.

Author Marguerite Duras was born in Indochina, in 1914. The French writer is the author of the novel The Lover (1984) and the screenplay Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1960).

Emerson’s idea of “the soul of the whole” appeared first in the essay, “The Over-Soul,” included in his First Series (1841).

Bertolt Brecht follows the general outline of English playwright John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), but focuses more on social evils in The Threepenny Opera.

Born in 1266, Beatrice Portinari, wife of Simone de’ Bardi, was Dante’s junior by one year. They were in their youth when Dante (1265-1321) fell in love with her. She died in 1290, leaving Dante in mourning. He wrote about her in the Vita Nuova (1294) and the Divine Comedy (1321).

Hart Crane’s last words were “Goodbye, everybody!” He said it just before committing suicide by jumping off a ship in 1932.

Raskolnikov murders the old pawnbroker Alena Ivanovna and her sister, Lizaveta in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

The Lord High Everything in W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s operetta The Mikado (1885) was first called “Pooh-Bah”.

The sequel to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward is Equality (1897).

The stockyard district where main character Jurgis Rudkis lives and works in The Jungle is known as Packingtown, in Chicago. The 1906 book led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act. the stockyard district where main character Jurgis Rudkis lives and works in The Jungle

Literary critic Joel Spingarn invented the term “New Criticism” in 1910 in an address at Columbia University called “The New Criticism.” The term did not come into general use until John Crowe Ransom’s book The New Criticism (1941). New Critics focused on the literary text as a discrete whole rather than on historical or biographical … Read more

In The Iliad (9th century B.C.), Thetis, a sea nymph is Achilles’ mother.

Kugelmass has an affair with Emma Bovary in Woody Allen’s short story “The Kugelmass Episode”. The Great Persky projects the bored professor into Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856) and Emma Bovary into modern Manhattan.

The poet laureate of England Tennyson sent the wreath to Victor Hugo’s funeral. The author of the novel Les Miserables (1862) was also a great lyric poet. His poetic works included Contemplations (1856).

The novel The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker tells the story of a single lunch hour. Much of the book focuses on an escalator ride.

Poet Vachel Lindsay killed himself by drinking Lysol, in 1931 at age fifty-two.

The leader of the intellectual group the “New Humanists” which, during the flowering of modernism, tried to spur interest in the classics, was Irving Babbitt, professor of romance languages at Harvard from 1894 to 1933.

Written in 1950, when he was thirty, Isaac Asimov’s first book was Pebble in the Sky. The Russian-born writer has over 400 books to his credit, including science fiction, science nonfiction, mystery, textbooks, and a guide to Shakespeare.

Joseph Conrad make the journey down the Congo River in 1890, aboard the Roi des Beiges and it became the basis for Heart of Darkness. Conrad took over as ship master when the captain fell ill of tropical fever.

Greek tragic actors wore “buskins,” boots that reached halfway up the calf and had thick soles to make the actors seem taller. The Greek word for the boot was cothurnus. “Buskin” first appeared as the English term in the sixteenth century.

It is estimated that the first edition of one of the great American poems, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass sold no more than three dozen copies when it was first published in 1855.

The author of The Red Badge of Courage (1895), Stephen Crane was born in 1871, six years after the end of the Civil War. He died in 1900.

Chaucer’s pilgrims are going to Canterbury Cathedral to visit the shrine of Thomas a Becket, former archbishop of Canterbury. Becket had been assassinated in the cathedral in 1170, following a political disagreement with King Henry II. Pilgrimage to the shrine was a popular journey at the time the Tales were written (c. 1387-1400).

Alexander Pope’s expression of charity, “To err is human, to forgive divine” appears in An Essay on Criticism (1711).

Northrop Frye’s first book was Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947). The influential scholar is best known for his Anatomy of Criticism (1957), in which he introduced a critical system based on analysis of literary archetypes.

John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819) contains the line “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”.

In The Iliad (ninth century B.C.), Venus is Aeneas’s mother?

Langston Hughes’ poem “Harlem” (1951) refers to a “raisin in the sun”. Hughes asks: “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?”

His Family by Ernest Poole won the first Pulitzer Prize in 1918.

The rest of the nursery rhyme from which Ken Kesey took the title for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is: Wire, briar, limber, lock, Three geese in a flock, One flew East, one flew West, One flew over the cuckoo’s nest.

Only Good Deeds goes with Everyman to face Judgment. In the 1495 morality play, Everyman is deserted by Beauty, Strength, Discretion, and Five Wits.

According to the Book of Genesis, Ishmael is the son of Abraham and Hagar.

Dr. Faustus, the scholar who sells his soul to Satan is torn apart by devils at the end of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus.

According to Aristotle, intuition and harmony leads a writer to create. In the Poetics (335-322 B.c.), he writes: “[T]he instinct of intuition is implanted in man from childhood . . . and through intuition he learns his earliest lessons. . . . Next there is the instinct for ‘harmony’ and rhythm, meters being manifestly sections … Read more

No, the title character in Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar does not have a name.

In Don Marquis’s “archy and mehitabel” stories, Archy is the cockroach, Mehitabel the cat. Archy was said to have written the stories at night on newspaper columnist Marquis’s typewriter. He wrote without capitals because he couldn’t reach the shift key. The stories were first collected in archy and mehitabel (1927).

The people of Blefuscu, an island northeast of Lilliput, were the enemies of the Lilliputians. The people there were as tiny and mean-spirited as the Lilliputians. Swift meant Blefuscu to represent France, while Lilliput represented England.

No, they used male pseudonyms: Charlotte was Currer Bell; Emily was Ellis Bell; and Anne was Acton Bell.

The riddle of the Sphinx is as follows: “What animal walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three at night?” the Sphinx asks Oedipus, the hero of Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex (426 B.c.). Oedipus answers that it is man (crawling as an infant, walking erect as an adult, and walking with … Read more

The Mill on the Floss is the Dorlcote Mill, located in St. Ogg’s on the River Floss. It is owned by Edward Tulliver, father of Maggie Tulliver, central character of George Eliot’s 1860 novel, The Mill on the Floss.

Francis Otto Matthiessen (1902-50) coined the phrase the “American Renaissance”, in his work The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941). The phrase refers to a time in the mid-nineteenth century that saw a flourishing of talent in American letters. Francis Otto Matthiessen (1902-50), in his work The American … Read more

The octopus in Frank Norris’s novel is the Pacific and Southwestern Railroad. The railroad dominates the California state government, manipulates other industries, and oppresses struggling wheat farmers.

Rhett Butler’s parting shot to Scarlett O’Hara in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind is “My dear, I don’t give a damn.” In the 1939 movie, it became, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

Jo March married an elderly German professor named Mr. Bhaer in Little Women.

Archibald Macleish (1892-1982) said, “A poem should not mean/But be” in Ars Poetica.

Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (c. 1851) ends with: “And we are here as on a darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/Where ignorant armies clash by night”.

Medea was the Princess of Colchis and the wife of Jason, the King of Iolcus. Her father was King Aeetes of Colchis. Medea, by Euripides, was first performed in 431 B.C.

Writer George Henry Lewes (1817-78), who was officially married to another woman, Agnes, but unable to get a divorce, was George Eliot’s (1819-80) living companion. Eliot and Lewes lived together from 1854 until his death in 1878.

Leo Tolstoy served in the Crimean War (1853-56), though he is best known for his treatment of the Napoleonic Wars in War and Peace (1863-69).

The name of the minor-league team in Mark Harris’s Bang the Drum Slowly is The New York Mammoths. The novel’s narrator is Henry Wiggen, star pitcher for the Mammoths.

The “Whore of Babylon” appears in the New Testament Book of Revelation 17:1-7. The whore sits on a scarlet beast with seven heads and ten horns. She holds a cup of abominations and has written on her forehead: “Babylon the Great, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth.” She was probably meant originally … Read more

Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) by Oscar Wilde includes the statement “I can resist everything except temptation”.

“Q” is the hypothetical source used by synoptic evangelists Matthew and Luke. Never found, it is believed to contain the sayings and stories that Matthew and Luke, but not Mark, share. The term comes from German Quelle, or “source.”

The Parallel Lives (first century A.D.) pairs biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, such as the orators Demosthenes and Cicero. The book provided background for some of Shakespeare’s plays, including Julius Caesar.

Daisy Miller’s real name is Annie Miller. She appears in Henry James’s short novel Daisy Miller (1878).

Edgar Allan Poe Roderick Usher, in “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839).

Unlike the 1988 film adaptation, in which Roy Hobbs wins the World Series with a pyrotechnic home run, Bernard Malamud’s original story The Natural has the slugger, preoccupied with sex and materialism, throw the final game of the World Series.

Sam Shepard’s first play was The Tooth of Crime (1973). His later plays include Buried Child (1979) and True West (1980).

The real name of the title character in The Deerslayer (1841) is Nathaniel (Natty) Bumppo. In other James Fenimore Cooper novels, he is also known as Hawkeye, Leather-stocking, La Longue Carabine, and Pathfinder.

Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland appeared in 1577. This history was Shakespeare’s source for much of Macbeth, King Lear, and Cymbeline. Holinshed died about 1580.

Professor James Moriarty, “the Napoleon of Crime,” was killed. Moriarty and Holmes, locked in combat, fell over the edge of the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. Amazingly, Holmes survived.

In 1897, Mark Twain was in seclusion, grieving over a death in the family, when a sensationalistic newspaper reported that he had died impoverished in London. When a reporter appeared at Twain’s home, the writer read a prepared statement containing the famous line “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”.

The author of Winesburg, Ohio (1919) Sherwood Anderson died of peritonitis after swallowing a toothpick at a cocktail party in 1941.

Henry Miller was married four times.

Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-96) put the traditional song “Auld Lang Syne” into its present form in The Scots Musical Museum (1787-1803).

“Well, let’s get on with it. . . .” is the last line of Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit. It is spoken by Garcia when he realizes he is facing eternity.

A crocodile ate Captain Hook’s hand, then followed him around the seas in search of more of him in James M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan.

Vladimir Nabokov wrote ten novels in Russian before turning to English, including Laughter in the Dark (1938). His first novel written in English was The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941). Nabokov (1899-1977) came to the United States in 1940 and was naturalized in 1945.

Antigone’s two brothers are Eteocles and Polyneices. Both are dead when the play opens, but Creon forbids the burial of Polyneices, who had rebelled against Creon’s rule. Antigone gives him a token burial anyway. Antigone also has a sister, Ismene.

Charlotte Bronte, the most famous of the Bronte sisters, wrote Jane Eyre in 1847. Emily Bronte, whose work is notable for its spirit of passion and rebellion, wrote Wuthering Heights in 1848.

Eugene O’Neill won four Pulitzer prizes, for Beyond the Horizon (1920), Anna Christie (1922), Strange Interlude (1928), and Long Day’s Journey into Night (1957).

Scheherazade is the narrator of the Arabian Nights (c. 1450), who tells stories night after night to keep her husband, the Sultan Schahriah, from strangling her at dawn. Scheherazade tells her stories to her sister Dinarzade in the Sultan’s hearing.

Washington Irving is believed to have originated the expression “the Almighty Dollar” in Wolfert’s Roost (1855).