Literature

The hero of Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha (1855) belonged to the Mohawk tribe, one of the Five Nations of the Iroquois.

Judas received thirty pieces of silver for betraying Christ. In Matthew’s Gospel, Judas throws away the money and hangs himself after the betrayal.

“Mistah Kurtz—he dead,” from Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness is the quotation at the start of T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men”.

George F. Babbitt, the lead character in Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt (1922), is a real-estate dealer in Zenith, an average American city. He is married to Myra Babbitt; his children are named Verona and Ted.

The name of the daughter of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind was Bonnie Blue Butler. She is killed at an early age in a riding accident.

The seven virtues are: faith, hope, charity (or love), prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. The first three are called the theological virtues, the last four the cardinal virtues.

Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” (1681) is the source of the title of Robert Penn Warren’s World Enough and Time.

Edgar Allan Poe invented detective C. Auguste Dupin, the coolly logical amateur sleuth of three stories published in the 1840s: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” and “The Purloined Letter.”

James Joyce married Nora Barnacle in 1931, just ten years before his death. They had lived together since 1904.

Washington Irving and fellow American writer John H. Payne were said to have competed for the affection of the author of Frankenstein during a visit to France from 1824 to 1826. Mary’s husband Percy Shelley had died two years earlier.

In Rabelais’s French satire Gargantua and Pantagruel (1533), Gargantua is Pantagruel’s father. Both are giants who go on humorous adventures.

Mother Goose first appeared in Charles Perrault’s Mother Goose Tales (1697), a collection of popular folk stories. She is depicted at the front of the book in an illustration of an old woman telling tales by firelight to children.

Robert Graves wrote one sequel to I, Claudius, Claudius the God, published in 1934. It charts Claudius’s rule from 41 A.D. until his poisoning by his wife Agrippina in 54 A.D.

Miss Lonelyhearts’ real name was never given.

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) wrote, “Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive”, not Shakespeare.

Three novels comprise John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga: 1. The Man of Property (1906) 2. In Chancery (1920) 3. To Let (1921) and two “interludes”: 1. Indian Summer of a Forsyte (1922) 2. Awakenings (1922)

Maya Angelou and Godfrey Cambridge collaborated on Cabaret for Freedom in 1960. Cambridge is best known for his appearances in films like Watermelon Man (1970) and Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970). Angelou’s poetry, prose, and drama include the autobiographical volume, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969).

The pseudonym Martinus Scriblerus was adopted by several members of the Scriblerus Club, a group formed to ridicule “false tastes in learning.” Members of the club included Jonathan Swift, John Arbuthnot, Alexander Pope, and John Gay. The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, written mainly by Arbuthnot, were issued in 1741.

Selma LagerlOf of Sweden was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1909. She is known for such works as Jerusalem (1901-02), a collection of stories about Swedish peasant life.

The author of Naked Lunch (1959) William Burroughs unsuccessfully attempted to shoot a glass off his wife’s head.

Merlin the sorcerer first appeared in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain (1137). This Latin prose work by the English chronicler also helped build the legend of Merlin’s protégé, King Arthur.

George Orwell’s real name was Eric Arthur Blair.

The title of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars refers to the banner of the Irish Citizens Army, of which O’Casey was once a member. The play concerns members of the army before and during the Easter Rising in 1916.

Robert Burns wrote “O, my luve’s like a red, red rose/That’s newly sprung in June” in “A Red, Red Rose” (1796).

Roland and Orlando are the same character. Roland, knight of Charlemagne’s court, is the hero of The Song of Roland, an eleventh-century French epic. Orlando is the Italian form of Roland’s name; he appears in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1532).

Lewis Carroll’s books are said to have been written for a friend, Alice Liddell. Liddell, with three other children on an 1862 boating trip, inspired the first of the stories, which Carroll initially called Alice’s Adventures Underground. The book, with additional tales as well as illustrations, was published in 1865, followed in 1871 by Through … Read more

In an 1895 article in North American Review, Twain said that James Fenimore Cooper violated 18 of the 19 rules for romantic fiction in The Deer-slayer. On one page alone, Cooper is said to have scored a record-breaking 114 offenses out of a possible 115. Some of the rules Cooper broke included: —   “That a … Read more

Gwendolyn Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize in Literature in 1950, for Annie Allen.

Edward Stratemeyer, under the pseudonym Franklin W. Dixon created the Hardy Boys.

Joseph Conrad define his task as a writer as, “to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see!” in the preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897).

Melville’s model of passive resistance Bartleby the Scrivener calmly replies to his boss, “I would prefer not to.” The short story “Bartleby the Scrivener” was first published anonymously in Putnam’s Magazine in 1853.

In The Scarlet Letter, the father of Hester Prynne’s child, Pearl is the town’s minister, Arthur Dimmesdale, who is tormented by his illicit act.

The source of the popular Disney film One Hundred and One Dalmatians was Dodie Smith’s 1956 novel.

The end of The Lady or the Tiger is not revealed. It is not revealed.

Mocha Dick was a legendary white whale said to have killed more than thirty men and attacked several ships in the 1800s. His story was told in The Knickerbocker Magazine in 1839. Melville’s Moby-Dick of 1851 may have been influenced by the story.

Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme’s name is Monsieur Jourdain, a well-to-do tradesman in the play written by Moliere in 1670.

In Robert Browning’s poem, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (1855), Childe Roland is a knight errant in search of the Dark Tower. When he reaches it he blows his horn, the poem ends. The title comes from a piece of a song in Shakespeare’s King Lear (act 3, scene 4).

Thomas Shadwell was refer to as “Mac Flecknoe”, a playwright whose work John Dryden despised. Dryden satirized Shadwell as the son of (“Mac”) Richard Flecknoe, another bad contemporary poet.

Hemingway’s alter ego Nick Adams, the central figure of In Our Time (1924), makes his first appearance in “Indian Camp” (1923).

There are 24 Canterbury Tales. In the order accepted in standard texts, they are: Knight’s Tale Miller’s Tale Reeve’s Tale Cook’s Tale Man of Law’s Tale Wife of Bath’s Tale Friar’s Tale Summoner’s Tale Clerk’s Tale Merchant’s Tale Squire’s Tale Franklin’s Tale Physician’s Tale Pardoner’s Tale Shipman’s Tale Prioress’s Tale Tale of Sir Thopas Tale … Read more

The Japanese novel The Tale of Genji was written by court lady Murasaki Shikibu around 1000. It was first translated into English by Arthur Waley in 1925-33. It is widely thought of as the world’s first novel. This Japanese novel was written by court lady Murasaki Shikibu around 1000. It was first translated

Yes. Ian Fleming (1908-1964), the author of the James Bond novels began his intelligence work during World War II, when he served as the director of Naval Intelligence in Britain. After D Day, he was placed in charge of an assault unit that became known as Fleming’s Private Navy. It obtained German code books and … Read more

Bloomsday, the date on which James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is set, is June 16, 1904.

Odysseus descends into the underworld in Book XI of XXIV of Homer’s Odyssey .

In the novel My Friend Flicka by Mary O’Hara, Flicka, a half-wild filly, is the friend of ten-year-old Ken McLaughlin in Wyoming.

Dr. Felix Hoenikker in Cat’s Cradle (1963) invented ice-nine. Ice-nine is a form of water that freezes at 114.4 degrees Fahrenheit. When it is accidentally released into the ocean, it freezes the entire world. Dr. Felix Hoenikker in Cat’s Cradle (1963). Ice-nine is a form of water that freezes at 114.4 degrees Fahrenheit. When it … Read more

The title character of the 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf is named Clarissa.

Scylla, a female six-headed monster, captured sailors and ate them. Charybdis was a whirlpool (or a creator of whirlpools) that swallowed ships. The two creatures lay in wait on either side of the Straits of Messina between Italy and Sicily. Their story is told in Homer’s Odyssey (ninth century B.C.).

Four new Barbara Pym novels have been published since her death in 1980: 1. A Few Green Leaves (1980) 2. An Unsuitable Attachment (1982) 3. Crampton Hodnet (1985) 4. An Acadeniic Question (1986) – A memoir, A Very Private Eye, was published in 1984.

Will Durant was twelve years older than Ariel Durant. The authors of the multivolume series The Story of Civilization (1935-67) were married in New York City in 1913, when he was twenty-seven and she was fifteen.

The Koran existed first in oral form as a series of revelations recited by the prophet Muhammad (570-632), founder of Islam. His followers wrote down or committed to memory the individual surahs, or chapters, but these were not collected in authoritative form until about 650.

Thomas Hardy published his last novel thirty-three years before his death. Hardy’s last novel was Jude the Obscure (1895), the story of Jude Fawley’s adulterous love for his cousin Sue Bridehead. The novel so shocked readers that Hardy gave up writing fiction and turned to poetry. Hardy died in 1928.

Edgar Allan Poe’s epitaph was “Quoth the Raven nevermore,” from his poem “The Raven” (1845).

The first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction was Edith Wharton (1862-1937) in 1921 for The Age of Innocence.

The hero of William Faulkner’s Light in August is Joe Christmas. He was a man believed to be part black, who murders a white woman named Joanna Burden and is castrated and killed for it.

The musical The Fantasticks by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt has been running for over thirty years, since May 1960.

From Jonathan Swift’s The Battle of the Books (1704). Matthew Arnold used the phrase “sweetness and light” in Culture and Anarchy (1869) to elaborate his idea of culture as a humanizing and ennobling force.

The first national copyright act was passed in England in 1709.

The Augean stables that Hercules had to clean held 3,000 cattle and had not been cleaned in thirty years. Cleaning them was the sixth of Hercules’ seven labors. Hercules’ story was told by Ovid (43 B.c.-17 A.D.) and Apollodorus (first-second century A . D. ).

The names of the three tragedies in Aeschylus’s Oresteia are: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides, all first presented in 458 B.C.

Clifford Odets wrote a play called Paradise Lost that was not based on Milton’s poem, in 1935. The play was about the fall of a middle-class family.

The name of Miss Havisham’s house in Dickens’s Great Expectations is Satis House.

Shakespeare’s wife was eight years older than him. They were married in 1582, when he was eighteen.

Yes, there a real Baron Miinchausen. Baron Karl Friedrich Hieronymus von Miinchausen (1720-1797), a German adventurer, is believed to have served in the Russian army against the Turks. He was known for exaggerating his exploits. Satirical stories about him were told by Rodolf Erich Raspe in Baron Miinchausen, Narrative of his Marvellous Travels (1785).

Aeneas descends into the underworld in book VI of XII of Vergil’s Aeneid.

The first book printed in English is The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, a prose romance by Raoul Lefevre, printed by William Caxton in 1474 in Bruges, Belgium. Caxton himself translated it from the French. Caxton also printed the first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, published on November … Read more

The male advice columnist Miss Lonelyhearts wrote for the New York Post-Dispatch in Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (1946).

The author of Gone With the Wind (1936) Margaret Mitchell died in 1949 at age forty-eight after being hit by a taxi in Atlanta. The author of Gone With the Wind (1936) died in 1949 at age forty-eight after being hit by a taxi in Atlanta.

The subtitle of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death.

C. S. Lewis married Joy Davidman in 1956. She died of cancer in 1960, three years before Lewis’s own death in 1963. Their story is told in Lewis’s A Grief Observed (1961).

Hamartia is the fatal flaw that brings a good character to ruin. Hubris is pride, the classic example of hamartia.

Orson Welles’s 1942 movie The Magnificent Ambersons was based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Booth Tarkington. Tarkington also won a Pulitzer for the novel Alice Adams (1921).

The rainbow in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is the arc a rocket makes from launch to target. The novel is set in World War II Europe at the time German V-2 rockets were falling on London.

The name Swift gave to his race of rational horses in Gulliver’s Travels is spelt Houyhnhnms. Their subjects, a race of nasty human-like creatures, had an easier name: Yahoos.

C. K. Scott Moncrieff took the title Remembrance of Things Past for his 1922 English translation of Proust from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30: “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/I summon up remembrance of things past.” The literal translation of Proust’s title is “In Search of Lost Time.”

The subtitle of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo is A Tale of the Seaboard.

Charles Dickens wrote two historical novels: A Tale of Two Cities (1859), set in London and Paris during the French Revolution, and Barnaby Rudge (1841), set during the anti-Catholic riots sparked by Lord George Gordon in 1780.

The annual prize for poetry,  the Bollingen Prize, was first awarded in 1949 to Ezra Pound for his Pisan Cantos (1948).

Yes, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym (1838) is based upon actual events. The adventures of J. N. Reynolds is about a stowaway who survived a mutiny, cannibalism, and other adventures.

Wilhelm Carl (1786-1859; Jacob, 1785-1863) was the younger brother. Their book Children’s and Household Tales, now known as Grimm’s Fairy-Tales, first appeared in 1812.

Hans Christian Andersen’s first novel The Improvisatore was published in 1835. Later the same year, Andersen published Tales Told for Children, which included well-known tales as well as an original story, “Little Ida’s Flowers.”

Richard Wright took the title Native Son from Nelson Algren, after the title was rejected for Algren’s novel Somebody in Boots (1935).

The first movie mentioned by name in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer is Stagecoach (1939), directed by John Ford.

Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple is comprised of letters from a black Southern woman named Celie to God, her sister, Nettie, and a missionary in Africa, and of Nettie’s letters to Celie.

The series of seven children’s books by C. S. Lewis started in 1950 with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and continued with Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair, The Magician’s Nephew, The Horse and His Boy, and The Last Battle.

The author/illustrator Maurice Sendak was a designer of window displays in a toy store when he was commissioned to illustrate The Wonderful Farm by Marcel Ayme in 1951. Sendak wrote and illustrated his first children’s book, Kenny’s Window, in 1956.

There are six elements necessary to a play according to Aristotle: plot, thought, character, diction, music, and spectacle.

Mexico’s best-known author Carlos Fuentes (The Death of Artemio Cruz, 1962; The Old Gringo, 1985) first began writing in English, but has since switched to his native language, Spanish.

Said’s real name was H. H. Munro (1870-1916). The Scottish fiction writer and playwright was born in Burma and killed by a sniper in France during World War I.

Ezra Mannon, a New England general returning from the Civil War represents Agamemnon in Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra. His wife Christine represents Clytemnestra.