How well was Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass initially received?
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.
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.
Faust’s soul is rescued by a choir of angels at the end of Goethe’s Faust (1808).
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 the 1898 essay “What is Art?” Leo Tolstoy defines art as: “a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them.”
In Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel of the same name, it is the catch that prevents a U.S. Air Force pilot from asking to be grounded on the basis of insanity. A man “would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If…
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…
The subtitle of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death.