Who was the first female professional author in English?
Aphra Behn (1640-89), author of the play The Rover (1677) and the novel Oroonoko (1688).
She wrote under the pseudonym Astrea.
Aphra Behn (1640-89), author of the play The Rover (1677) and the novel Oroonoko (1688).
She wrote under the pseudonym Astrea.
Dr. Faustus in Christopher Marlowe’s play Dr. Faustus (c. 1588-92), on conjuring up Helen of Troy.
Ernest Hemingway won one Pulitzer prize, for The Old Man and the Sea (1952).
Nelson Algren received the first National Book Award for Fiction in 1950 for The Man with the Golden Arm.
Tess’s name before she becomes Tess of the d’Urbervilles is Tess Durbeyfield, daughter of Jack Durbeyfield, a carter. In the 1891 novel by Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, she eventually becomes the kept woman of Alec d’Urbervilles, a member of the well-to-do family for whom she is working.
In Don Marquis’s “archy and mehitabel” stories, Archy is the cockroach, Mehitabel the cat. Archy was said to have written the stories at night on newspaper columnist Marquis’s typewriter. He wrote without capitals because he couldn’t reach the shift key. The stories were first collected in archy and mehitabel (1927).
Jay Gatsby was supposed to have gone to Oxford. In Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) the gangster Wolfsheim said Gatsby was an “Oggsford” man.