Was Sinbad the Sailor an Arabian?
Sinbad the Sailor was an Iraqi, a merchant shipwrecked after setting sail from Basra, now Iraq.
The story of his seven voyages is told in The Thousand and One Nights.
Sinbad the Sailor was an Iraqi, a merchant shipwrecked after setting sail from Basra, now Iraq.
The story of his seven voyages is told in The Thousand and One Nights.
The first line of Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel is “Call me Smitty.” Through his narrator, Word Smith, Roth not only spoofs Melville, but Hawthorne, Twain, Hemingway, and all other writers who pursued the Great American Novel.
Thomas Chatterton was the author of several pseudo fifteenth-century poems supposedly written by monk Thomas Rowley. He committed suicide in his London garret by taking arsenic at age seventeen, driven to despair by poverty. He became a hero of native English verse to Romantic poets such as Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats. Chatterton was the author…
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.
Maud Gonne did not marry William Butler Yeats, the poet who made the actress famous through his poems of unrequited love. In 1903, after knowing Yeats for fourteen years, Gonne married Major John MacBride, an Irish revolutionary characterized by Yeats as a “drunken, vainglorious lout.” MacBride was executed for his role in the Easter Rebellion…
The male advice columnist Miss Lonelyhearts wrote for the New York Post-Dispatch in Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (1946).
The full title of Oliver Twist is Oliver Twist, or, The Parish Boy’s Progress.