In what war did Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) serve?
Leo Tolstoy served in the Crimean War (1853-56), though he is best known for his treatment of the Napoleonic Wars in War and Peace (1863-69).
Leo Tolstoy served in the Crimean War (1853-56), though he is best known for his treatment of the Napoleonic Wars in War and Peace (1863-69).
A scrivener is a copier of legal documents.
James Joyce married Nora Barnacle in 1931, just ten years before his death. They had lived together since 1904.
Percy Shelley’s first wife Harriet Westbrook Shelley committed suicide by drowning in 1816, two years after Shelley left her for Mary Wollstonecraft. Shelley had eloped with the sixteen-year-old Harriet in 1811. Shelley himself died by drowning in a boating accident aboard his schooner, Ariel, in 1822.
It was not Mark Twain who said the phrase. The quote first appeared in an editorial in the Hartford Courant of August 24, 1897, probably written by associate editor Charles Dudley Warner. Warner had collaborated with Twain on The Gilded Age (1873).
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.
In October 1849, the forty-year-old writer Edgar Allan Poe was found lying unconscious near a polling place in Baltimore. According to some reports, he had been fed liquor and dragged to various polling places to vote repeatedly. He was taken to a hospital where he remained semicomatose for three days. On October 7, 1849, at…