What is unusual about Samuel Beckett’s 1970 play Breath?
The thirty-second piece Breath by Samuel Beckett has no actors and no dialogue.
The thirty-second piece Breath by Samuel Beckett has no actors and no dialogue.
The real name of the title character in The Deerslayer (1841) is Nathaniel (Natty) Bumppo. In other James Fenimore Cooper novels, he is also known as Hawkeye, Leather-stocking, La Longue Carabine, and Pathfinder.
“Q” is the hypothetical source used by synoptic evangelists Matthew and Luke. Never found, it is believed to contain the sayings and stories that Matthew and Luke, but not Mark, share. The term comes from German Quelle, or “source.”
Rubaiyat is the plural of the Persian word meaning “a poem of four lines.” The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam of Naishapur is a poem composed of such quatrains. The twelfth-century Persian poem was translated freely into English by Edward FitzGerald in 1859.
Jonathan Swift first used the phrase “belles lettres” in Tatler 230 (1710): “The Traders in History and Politics, and the Belles Lettres.” In French the term means “beautiful letters, fine writing.” Swift added the pejorative connotation of light or trivial literature.
Paul Gauguin’s life is the basis for W. Somerset Maugham’s novel The Moon and Sixpence (1919). In the novel, Charles Strickland is a London stockbroker who leaves his family to paint in the South Seas.
Ten Americans have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature: Sinclair Lewis (1930); Eugene O’Neill (1936); Pearl S. Buck (1938); William Faulkner (1949); Ernest Hemingway (1954); John Steinbeck (1962); Saul Bellow (1976); Isaac Bashevis Singer, a naturalized citizen (1978); Czeslaw Milosz, a naturalized citizen (1980); and Joseph Brodsky, a naturalized citizen (1987).