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| Displaying literature Anecdotes: 261 Found |
Punctuated Equilibrium?
In 1802, Timothy Dexter published a twenty-four page pamphlet (entitled "A Pickl...
Deep Thought
"Scientists in Cambridge spent three years calculating one of the fundamental ke...
Sorry Kipling
In 1889, the editor of the San Francisco Examiner, having published one a...
Ossian, My Ass?
The volume of poems allegedly written by the Highland bard Ossian (and translate...
Royal Criticism
A young poet once sent Hermann Bahr a historical tragedy, along with a request f...
Whatsisname?
According to comedian Steve Allen, his executive producer, Bill Harbach, had the...
Greene with Envy?
An English magazine once ran a competition offering a prize for the best parody ...
Open Season?
While hunting one day with director Howard Hawks and William Faulkner, the accla...
Tamarack Review
Mazo de la Roche, famed for her Jalna novels, once submitted a short stor...
Plane Odd?
As an Oxford don, Lewis Carroll befriended Alice Liddell (the young daughter of ...
Mating of Tigers
Edith Sitwell once received letter from a concerned reader. "Dear Dame Edith," i...
Doodoo Defense (long)
In June 1990, a conservative group led by Florida lawyer Jim Thompson persuaded ...
Wayward Bus
One day several thousand copies of John Steinbeck's latest novel were destroyed ...
Thoreau's Library
When Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers failed to sell,...
Day of Judgement? (long)
Farrar, Strauss & Co's stable of authors often acted as readers for the firm. Ar...
Blood and Dust
Robert Fitzgerald, who often worried that his translations of such ancient class...
Philip K. Dick: Strange Coi...
"About four years after [Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said] was published...
Dylan Thomas: Llareggub
Dylan Thomas was once asked what "Llareggub" (the name of the Welsh fishing vill...
Mad Laughter
"The only disadvantage I laboured under at St Paul's School," Eric Newby once re...
Thomas Bowdler: Wreck of th...
Victorian to the core, the English editor Thomas Bowdler earned a measure of fam...
Robert Frost: Beloved Profe...
Between 1916 and 1920, Robert Frost taught English literature at Amherst College...
Joyous Serendipity
"Once or twice Joyce dictated a bit of Finnegans Wake to Samuel Beckett, ...
Poor Balzac!
A Parisian bookseller, having pegged Balzac as a promising young writer, decided...
Pride
A British newspaper once sent a questionnaire to several of the nation's preemin...
Shelley Jackson's Skin
In 2003, American author Shelley Jackson began "publishing" a short story entitl...
Room for Improvement?
Edith Wharton first attempted a novel at the tender age of eleven: "'Oh, how do ...
Quel Catastrophe...
Soon after Beckett married his long-time companion, Suzanne, their relationship ...
Dedicated Reviewer?
Thomas Wolfe dedicated his first, very long, novel to his editor, Maxwell Perkin...
Little Surprise
Following the publication of James Carroll's Mortal Friends in 1978, the ...
Hawthorne, Jr.
Nathaniel Hawthorne's son Julian (who was often confused with his famous father)...
Plosh!
W. S. Gilbert once fell into conversation with a group of Shakespeare-lovers at ...
Lady Chatterley's Lover
While writing for Field and Stream in the 1950s, Ed Zern suggested that t...
Novel Theorem
"I have had happily confirmed the confidences of Gavarni on the economical manne...
Oscar Wilde's Masterpiece
Wilde was once asked to make various changes to one of his plays. Wilde declined...
What the Dickens?
Though his turn as Micawber in George Cukor's adaptation of the Charles Dickens ...
Maugham Lambasted
The success of his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (which drew upon his expe...
Jimmy Carter: Hornblower
Jimmy Carter delivered a memorable oration at the funeral of former vice preside...
Mr. Hyde
Arriving at his lodgings in London one evening, the landscape painter William Hy...
Beeline
While Goldwyn Pictures chief Samuel Goldwyn would spare little expense acquiring...
Old Man and the Flea
In 2002, magazine editor and writer Kathryn Bold won Hemispheres magazine's Imit...
Slip Slip Rejection Slip
The style of famed experimental writer Gertrude Stein was not universally admire...
Fascist Novel
Dorothy Parker once reviewed a novel by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. "This...
Naked Came the Stranger
In 1969, on a literary lark, the legendary editor Mike McGrady assembled a group...
J. K. Rowling: Real Job
After purchasing Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (for $1,910) in...
Portrait of the Artist as a...
At the age of twenty-two, James Joyce was asked what he was thinking about when ...
Reading James Joyce
James Joyce was once asked about the demands his writing made upon the reader. "...
Smart Asset
As editor of The Smart Set, H. L. Mencken took Joseph Conrad under his wi...
Vivid Imagination
On his deathbed, Balzac is reported to have ordered the attending physician to "...
Margaret Laurence & Dale Zi...
As a young student at United College (in Winnipeg), Margaret Laurence could not ...
Herman J. Mankiewicz: Romeo...
Herman J. Mankiewicz, convinced that Three Comrades would make more money...
Longfellow & the Queen
"I assure you, Mr. Longfellow," the queen once told the poet, "you are very well...
Mitford & Evans
Dame Edith Evans was once informed that the noted writer Nancy Mitford was stayi...
Thinner Author?
In 1984, bookstores began selling a new novel by Richard Bachman entitled ...
Dorothy Parker: Constant Re...
"Constant Reader" was Dorothy Parker's book reviewing pseudonym at ...
Armchair Critic
"Crossing the Atlantic, Sinclair Lewis saw a lady on deck reading his latest boo...
Goose Egg
Emile Zola's success as a writer may have come as a shock to his teachers at the...
Hollywood Agent
Ignorance of the great classics was widespread during Hollywood's Golden Age. On...
James Ellroy: Cool Six Thou...
Though praised by many reviewers, James Ellroy's A Cool Six Thousand was ...
Literary Critic
Over lunch one day, A.V. Alexander, the First Lord of the Admiralty, lectured th...
Classic Cohn
One day Columbia Studios chief Harry Cohn heard about a popular story called ...
Bahh!
In 2002, British writer Valerie Laws received a £2,000 grant to explore the rela...
Russian Optimist?
In Anton Chekhov's story "The Malefactor," a fisherman, hoping to use them as we...
Bishop & Trollope
Anthony Trollope and Sir Henry Channon once visited Wells (home of the marvelous...
?
One day Victor Hugo, wondering what his publishers thought of his manuscript dra...
Critical Reception(ist)
Jack Kerouac's beatnik writing was not universally well-received. "That's not wr...
Diagnosis Murder?
"In 1977, a young Arab girl was flown to England in a semiconscious state and ad...
Critic
Oliver Herford was once asked his opinion of Arnold Bennett's work. "Well," he r...
For God's Sake
While traveling through rural Sussex one day, young Shelley was joined inside a ...
Executive Orders
In 2002, a national reading program assigned points to 50,000 books in a bid to ...
Favorite Author
James Cabell once received an amusing letter from one of his fans: "Dear Mr. Cab...
Shakespearean Insult
Shakespeare's plays are thought by many scholars to have been written by Francis...
Infinite Jest
During Andrew Jackson's first term, his friendship with Peggy Eaton, the attract...
Fitzgerald & Hemingway
F. Scott Fitzgerald had a low opinion of Ernest Hemingway as a human being. ("He...
On The Road
"Almost a year after The Town and The City was published, Jack Kerouac ar...
Wuthering Heights
When Samuel Goldwyn enlisted the veteran screenwriters Charles MacArthur and Ben...
Socialist Realism
The Russian writer Maksim Gorky (to whom the Soviet Encyclopedia once ref...
Robert Louis Stevenson: Cre...
Robert Louis Stevenson became so engrossed in the production of ...
By Jeeves!
"The Germans, in their literal way, took P. G. Wodehouse's works as a guide to E...
Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald's original title for The Great Gatsby was ...
Fiction and Reality
Tom Clancy was once asked how he thought fiction differed from reality. "The dif...
Synged
John Synge's The Playboy of the Western World was not universally well-re...
Vidal & Capote
Gore Vidal was no great fan of Truman Capote's work. "A great zircon," he once d...
Bad Sex Award
In November 2003, Sting had the honor of presenting Indian writer Aniruddha Baha...
Ernest Tidyman & John Shaft
Ernest Tidyman's son Nathaniel Rayle once related the genesis of his father's mo...
Stuart Townsend: Witching Hour
Stuart Townsend was cast to play the demon rocker whose music awakens Akasha, th...
Michel Thaler: Nulle Part
In 2004, French writer Michel Thaler published a 233 page novel, Le Train de ...
Mickey Spillane: Tough Love
Mickey Spillane's books, though relatively tame by later standards, were titilla...
Mickey Spillane & Ernest He...
"Many writers resented Mickey Spillane because he wrote pulp unapologetically an...
Madeleine L'Engle: Wrinkle ...
Madeleine L'Engle's contract with Farrar, Straus gave her publisher the rights t...
Dominic Dunne & Jane Stanto...
In April 2005, Dominic Dunne was sent the bound galleys of Jane Stanton Hitchcoc...
Archduchess Wine
"One night drinking with Ottocaro Weiss, who had returned from the army in Janua...
William F---kner?
In 1931, William Faulkner reviewed the galley proofs for Light In August, which,...
Deathbed Confession
While lying on his deathbed one day in 1635, Vega asked an attendant how much ti...
TV Dinner?
Walter Wetherell was once asked about the inspiration for his 'great American TV...
Chuckleberry Finn?
After thousands of copies of Twain's Huckleberry Finn had been printed an...
Richard Ford: Multitude of ...
Richard Ford's books were not always welcomed by critics. One novel was the unfo...
A Critic At Large
Dr. Samuel Johnson was once asked to share his opinion of Laurence Sterne's ...
Baker Street Irregular?
Mystery writer Rex Stout, an ardent fan of Arthur Conan Doyle and his legendary ...
Western Union
Concerned that bookstores might object to the obscene language in John Steinbeck...
Spenser & the Earl
When Edmund Spenser first showed sections of the Faerie Queene to the Ear...
To Be or Not to Be?
"Hamlet was to have been played at the Richmond Theatre by an inexperienc...
Ambition
One day Louis XIV, apprised of the great ambition of a certain courtier, summone...
Dizzy Reader
British prime minister Benjamin "Dizzy" Disraeli, the author of some sixty-seven...
Great War
James Joyce's entire formal education came at the hands of the Jesuits. By the t...
Dry Humor
Mark Twain was no fan of James Fenimore Cooper's fiction: "It is a restful chapt...
Pope's Iliad
Shortly after Alexander Pope had completed his translation of Homer's ...
Well of Loneliness
Because of its homosexual subject matter, Radclyffe Hall's classic novel ...
Ethan Canin: Little Coincid...
Shortly after the publication of Carry Me Across the Water, author Ethan ...
Telephanity
On day while editing Robert M. Coates's review of Ernest Hemingway's ...
Hornblower
Among C. S. Forester's fans was the wily Winston Churchill: "For the frst time f...
Old Curiosity
When The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) was first published (in serial form), ...
Sanctuary
"Faulkner's novel Sanctuary was the talk of Oxford... In the story a coll...
William Faulkner
"The novelist's job.. was to 'arrest motion,' to capture time in an 'inconclusiv...
Tolkien's Lord of the Rings
J. R. R. Tolkien, a mild-mannered professor of ancient languages at Oxford, was ...
Prescience
The official inventor of the periscope was not granted a patent on his device. W...
Good Evening, Mr Maugham
"Somerset Maugham was attending a dinner party. The Chinese butler remarked plea...
Southern Charm
In Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind - according to the battles ment...
Noteworthy?
In 1918, near the end of World War I, Ernest Hemingway was wounded at Fossalta d...
Cancerous Censorship?
Henry Miller's sexually explicit Tropic of Cancer was deemed obscene and ...
Germinal
When Emile Zola's novel Germinal (an exploration of the sordid lives of a...
Perfect Villain
The appearance of Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White (in 1860), featuring...
Small World
While traveling by bus to New York one day to visit her daughter, Carson McCulle...
Harry Potter and the Villag...
One day in 2000, J. K. Rowling was astonished by an accusation (levied by the Am...
Daniel Defoe: Crusoe Blooper
In his immortal novel, Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe had his shipwrecked ...
Cervantes
King Philip III of Spain once encountered a man reading at the side of the road;...
Kubla Khan (long)
"In the summer of 1797, the author [Samuel Taylor Coleridge], then in ill health...
Rowlinguist?
Like many chidren, J. K. Rowling's young daughter often had minor temper tantrum...
Nice Inheritance
One day in the late 1980s, Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy, two professors resear...
Samuel Goldwyn & the Mercha...
Edward G. Robinson was once invited to play the venal Jewish moneylender Shylock...
Anthony Trollope: Last Chro...
Anthony Trollope, writing in the drawing room of the Athenaeum club one morning,...
Blooming Feminism
Amy Bloom once reviewed Phillip Roth's Sabbath Theater. "If you didn't kn...
Blooming Admiration
Amy Bloom once received a note from fellow author Robert Stone, for whom she har...
Minor Correction
Some time after Empire Falls won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize, Richard Russo w...
Economic Poison
After the publication of The Whore's Child and Other Stories, Richard Rus...
RIP SOB?
Shortly after his death, Dorothy Parker visited F. Scott Fitzgerald's body in a ...
Grand Panjandrum
One day in 1755 the celebrated actor Charles Macklin boasted to Samuel Foote tha...
James M. Cain
"As the story goes, someone said to James M. Cain that 'Hollywood ruined your bo...
Bialik
Days before Chaim Bialik's death, the papers were rife with speculation that he ...
Ernest Hemingway & William ...
Ernest Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954, five years after it...
Cross Bearer?
Shortly after receiving the cross of the Legion of Honor, Anatole France (whose ...
Yank?
Though Farrar, Strauss & Co. would go on to become the noted publisher of dozens...
Farrar, Strauss & Co. (long)
During World War II, Farrar, Strauss & Co. had a curious arrangement whereby All...
Lost Weekend
For years, Roger Strauss's well-staffed home was an extension of the Farrar, Str...
Black Reputation?
While discussing plans to film The Grapes of Wrath with Twentieth Century...
War and Peas?
A classic episode of television's Seinfeld features a stereotypically sur...
Naked Lunch
Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs's epic beat-generation portrait of drug...
Film Adaptation
John le Carre was at best ambivalent about film adaptations. "Having your book t...
Harry Potter
The dominance of J. K. Rowling's (and Lemony Snickett's) books on the ...
Murder Plus?
"Poisonville," "The Cleansing of Poisonville," "The Black City," "The Seventeent...
The Great Gatsby
In a paper entitled "The Tragic Black 'Buck'," American literary scholar Carlyle...
Harlequin Romance?
Victoria and her daughter, the Empress Frederick of Prussia, once fell into an a...
Fairweather Friends
In 1803, Mme de Stael published her feminist novel Delphine, in which she...
Authoress?
His comprehensive study of Homer's work convinced Samuel Butler that the ...
Operatic Outlook
A friend of Luigi Arditi's, told of the composer's plans to visit Birmingham one...
Pink as a Fink? (long)
The Cat in the Hat was largely composed from three word lists, drawn up b...
Moby Dic?
"Although Herman Melville had proudly titled his new novel Moby Dick, the Britis...
Que? (long)
In February 2003, Vanity Fair published a satirical column written by Dam...
Recognition
"I almost think that if I'd gotten the Nobel Prize when ...
Brain Fog
Sir Walter Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor was written while its author w...
Shakespeare Mystery
In a bid to "fingerprint" various authors, a physicist named Thomas Corwin once ...
Punster
Shakespeare was a practiced punster. Macbeth alone contains at least 114 ...
Mock Jury
A mock jury was once convened in Elkton, Maryland, to try a famous criminal case...
Kipling's Nurse
One day Rudyard Kipling thanked the nurse who had cared for his firstborn child....
Imitation Faulkner (long)
In 2002, the writer and standup comedian Michael Edens won Hemispheres magazine'...
Arthurian Chivalry
The myth of Arthurian chivalry was celebrated most memorably in Sir Thomas Malor...
Dirac's Mistake
Like many mathematicians Paul Dirac could be excessively logical. The Russian ph...
Tolkien's Dwarves
Though best known as a fantasy writer, J. R. R. Tolkien, a mild-mannered profess...
Frances Trollope
"The English residents were not a little shy of her [the author Frances Trollope...
River Runs Through It
One day Norman MacLean was dismayed to learn that his classic novel ...
Rambling Writer
Marcel Proust was once dismayed to receive a rejection slip for his brilliant mu...
Crash
J. G. Ballard was once amused to learn that Crash had been rejected for p...
Ken Stabler
Oakland Raiders quarterback Ken Stabler and his teammates were once visited by a...
Oscar Wilde & Alexander Pope
Oscar Wilde was no great fan of Alexander Pope. "There are two ways of disliking...
Harold Bloom & American Lit...
"It is May 2002, and the critic Harold Bloom is in Barcelona to accept a prize. ...
Cold Turkey?
Screenwriter and director Anthony Minghella once vowed to stop making film adapt...
Gogol / Nozdrya!
Gogol was obliged to omit the disdainful exclamation "Nozdrya!" from his novel ...
Toni Morrison & the Nobel P...
When Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 (a year in...
Claus Sorenson: feast of wr...
"With hundreds of people at their keyboards, collaboration on a work of literatu...
John Steinbeck: Anatomy of ...
Young John Steinbeck once approached the dean of the medical school and asked fo...
J. K. Rowling: What's in a ...
The success of the Harry Potter series made author J. K. Rowling the weal...
Susanna Clarke: Strange Com...
Susanna Clarke spent ten years writing Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, la...
Philip Roth: Sit-Down Comic
"Philip Roth was once asked whether, in writing 'Portnoy,' [Portnoy's Complaint]...
Yeats Affection?
"Yeats, on first meeting the youthful novelist in Dublin, asked [James] Joyce to...
Boston Brahmin
When it was discovered one day that Cabot Martingale, a prototypical Boston ...
Gustave Bovary?
Gustave Flaubert's Emma Bovary scandalized the literary establishment with its b...
Simple Solution?
Mark Twain was no great fan of Jane Austen's work. "The omission of Jane Austen'...
What Woman?
Perhaps surprisingly, New Yorker founder Harold Ross was not noted for hi...
Brotherly Love?
An aspiring writer once questioned William James about his views on the use of d...
Robert Louis Stevenson: Str...
Robert Louis Stevenson spent several years fruitlessly searching for a story whi...
Thomas Macaulay: Socratic I...
Thomas Macaulay was no great fan of the Socratic method (as related in Plato's d...
John Thomas?
When Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H. Lawrence's notoriously explicit novel,...
Metamorphosis
A great admirer of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis (the tale of Gregor Sa...
Sterne Response
"Soon after Tristram Shandy appeared, Laurence Sterne asked a Yorkshire l...
Doctor Zhivago
In her autobiography, Boris Pasternak's mistress and muse, Olga Ivinskaya (the b...
Lady Windermere’s Fan?
Oscar Wilde was once amused to learn that Lady Windermere's Fan had been ...
Saint-Exupery: Little Fellow
While having lunch with a publisher one day in 1941, famed French pilot, adventu...
Flabby Direction
In Eugene O'Neill's play Where the Cross is Made, he gives the following ...
Toni Morrison: Beloved Fans
With the release of the film adaptation of Beloved (Toni Morrison's 1987 ...
Vane Sisters
Vladimir Nabokov was once dismayed to learn that The Vane Sisters had bee...
Toni Morrison: The Black Book
In 1974, Toni Morrison put together The Black Book, an influential compen...
Toni Morrison & Corregidora
By 1975, Toni Morrison had become the black editor at Random House (where...
Elmore Leonard: Crackhead Fans
Though he employed a research assistant to assemble background material for his ...
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One...
During a drive from Mexico City to Acapulco in 1965, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, stu...
Len Deighton Trilogy
Len Deighton once named the three books in an espionage series Spy Hook, ...
Divine Comedy
In his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, Dante chose another poet to serve ...
The Recognitions
"[William Gaddis'] The Recognitions was published by Harcourt, Brace in 1...
From Thence
"Things did not 'commence' in the Manchester Guardian they 'began'. Nevil...
Miserable Week?
Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Jacquelyn Reinach weathered her joyless Depression-era ...
Pirandello
"In 1918, when he was fifty and working on [his classic play] ...
Brian O'Doherty: Bahhhd Wri...
Brian O'Doherty's first novel The Deposition of Father McGreevy was short...
Supplemental Income
Edgar Allan Poe's astonishing talent secured him a number of jobs editing and wr...
Old Man and the Sea
Ernest Hemingway was once sued by a 70-year-old Cuban fisherman named Miguel Ram...
Native Son
Richard Wright once rejected an offer for the film rights to his classic novel ...
Swift Prediction
1726 saw the appearance of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, a fiction...
Moon and Sixpence
The Times Literary Supplement once reviewed William Somerset Maugham's ...
Appassionata Sonata
Beethoven was once asked to explain the meaning of the Sonata in D Minor, Op.31 ...
Burroughs & Beckett
"William S. Burroughs was a writer [Samuel Beckett] particularly didn't understa...
Richard Burton: Famous Last...
Richard Burton died on August 5, 1984, following a cerebral hemorrhage. His wife...
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Nec...
"At the Bogota newspaper, a friendly editor told his twenty-six-year-old cub rep...
Bulwer-Lytton
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, arguably the worst (serious) novelist in literary history,...
Elizabeth von Arnim: Causti...
"I asked Elizabeth [the novelist Elizabeth von Arnim]," Somerset Maugham once re...
Monstrous Creation
While living as neighbors on the shores of Lake Geneva during the summer of 1816...
Weaver's Twist
When Raymond Weaver gave his first English literature class their first ever qui...
E. M. Forster
Though he lived to be 91, E. M. Forster stopped writing fiction when he was just...
Schoenberg & Mann
Arnold Schoenberg, famed for his controversial twelve-tone (atonal) system, was ...
Vergil's Aeneid
Vergil, generally considered the greatest of the Roman poets, died while complet...
Little Lord Fauntleroy
In the mid-1930s, David O. Selznick began producing screen adaptations of classi...
Narayanaswami
"Like many young writers, R.K. Narayan found it difficult at first to get his wo...
Jonathan Franzen: Solidly S...
In October 2001, Oprah Winfrey selected Jonathan Franzen's National
Book Award-...
The Robbers
Goethe did not rank among Victor Hugo's favorite authors. "Goethe never wrote an...
Ian Fleming: Likely Story
James Bond creator Ian Fleming and Robert Harling fought side by side during Wor...
Dull Novel?
Irving Stone's Lust for Life was rejected for publication sixteen times. ...
Pernicious Poet
The publication of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, a collection of free v...
Crabmeat Dinner
One evening Bram Stoker indulged in a late supper of crabmeat. That night, he dr...
Young Margaret Laurence
While browsing through Margaret Laurence's library one day, a visitor
happened ...
Dante's Inferno
"In a famous anecdote Boccaccio tells, Dante overheard two women in Verona who s...
Johnson & Tennyson
Tennyson was no great fan of Ben Johnson's work. "Reading him," he once declared...
Gosse & Eliot
The work of critic and translator Edmund Gosse was not universally appreciated. ...
Gertrude Stein & Andre Gide
"I remember once coming into the room and hearing Bernard Fay say that the three...
Toni Morrison: The Bluest Eye
When Toni Morrison was young, she recalled, "another little black girl and I wer...
Maurice Sendak: Where the W...
"I remembered how I detested my Brooklyn relatives as a small child," famed chil...
Gertrude Stein: Ida
Gertrude Stein's 1941 novel Ida was not universally well-received. "Stein...
F. Scott Fitzgerald: Gushin...
"Middle-aged and sagging, F. Scott Fitzgerald once lost it when a fan gushed ove...
Thomas Hardy & the Church
The controversial publication of Jude the Obscure was not welcomed by the...
Chaucer
"Mr. C. had talent," Artemus Ward once wrote, "but he couldn't spel. No man had ...
Erica Jong
Erica Jong's quasi-autobiographical novel Fear of Flying, she once remark...
Howard Hawks
"It's often said that bad novels make good movies, and good novels make bad movi...
Chuck Palahniuk: Sick
Darkness ran through Chuck Palahniuk's family history. As a 4-year-old, his fath...
Dream
"Did you know," Max Beerbohm once asked his biographer, "that William Archer who...
Naked Lust
One day William S. Burroughs gave a manuscript of his latest book (entitled "Nak...
Alice Riddle
Lewis Carroll once supplied an answer to a riddle posed in ...
The Other Half
In his short story "Rich Boy" (from All the Sad Young Men), F. Scott Fitz...
Sexist Southey
In 1836, desperate to end her dreary life as a governess, Charlotte wrote to the...
Paradise Lost
After the English Restoration (in 1666), John Milton was fined and lost his fort...
Man, Interrupted
"After the first episodes of 'The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man,' T...
Waiting for Godot
"We only printed something like a thousand copies, and the first year it sold ab...
Tristram Shandy
"Nothing odd will do long," Samuel Johnson declared one day in 1776. "Tristra...
Just Willett
In 2004, novelist Jincy Willett published a novel hopefully entitled ...
Boccaccio's Edit
In 1557, a century after the invention of movable type, the Catholic Church issu...
Arthur J. Burks: Pulp
"During the decade or so that Burks lived in New York, after founding the Americ...
Boris Akunin
"Boris Akunin, for example, a distinguished philologist and deputy editor of a l...
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