Who created Charlie Chan?
Ohio-born writer Earl Derr Biggers invented the portly Honolulu detective Charlie Chan.
The first book about Chan was The House Without a Key (1925).
Ohio-born writer Earl Derr Biggers invented the portly Honolulu detective Charlie Chan.
The first book about Chan was The House Without a Key (1925).
New York socialite Edith Newbold Jones (1862-1937) married George Wharton in 1885. Their marriage lasted twenty-seven years until 1912, when she divorced him. By then she was living in France, where she remained until her death.
“In a Pickwickian sense” refers to the joking use of insulting words or epithets. The phrase comes from Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1836-37). Samuel Pickwick exchanges barbs in just such a friendly way with Mr. Blotton in Chapter One.
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were three Jews who were thrown into a fiery furnace by order of King Nebuchadnezzar in chapter 3 of the Old Testament Book of Daniel, as punishment for refusing to worship a golden idol. God saved them, however, allowing them to walk through the fire unharmed.
Chilean poet Pablo Neruda just barely lived to see the 1973 coup by right-wing General Pinochet. Neruda died of a heart attack in Chile just twelve days after the coup. Neruda had supported the overthrown President Allende.
John Greenleaf Whittier describes the bravery of the fictional title character in his poem “Barbara Frietchie” (1863) who said, “Shoot, if you must, this old gray head”. The aged Frietchie displays a Union flag when Confederate troops march by. Stonewall Jackson forbids his troops to harm the old woman.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the term “willing suspension of disbelief” in his critical treatise Biographia Literaria (1817). Coleridge used the term to refer to the “poetic faith” of a reader in accepting imaginary elements in a literary work.