The first published work of the poet and novelist Alice Walker was a book of poetry: Once: Poems (1968).
She followed up soon after, however, with a novel: The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970).
The wits who traded barbs at New York’s Algonquin Hotel in the 1920s included: Franklin P. Adams, Robert Benchley, Heywood Broun, Frank Case, Edna Ferber, George S. Kaufman, Harpo Marx, Neysa McMein, Dorothy Parker, Harold Ross, Robert E. Sherwood, and Alexander Woollcott. The Algonquin Hotel still stands. It was recently sold to a group of…
The title of O. Henry’s short story collection The Four Million refers to two things: it represents the population of New York City at the time, and it is an answer to Ward McAllister, who said “there are only about 400 people in New York society.” The collection contains the 1902 story, “The Gift of…
The Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction was first awarded in 1962 to Theodore H. White for The Making of the President 1960.
In The Iliad (ninth century B.C.), Venus is Aeneas’s mother?
The subtitle of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) was A Romance.
Twelfth-century Persian poet Omar Khayyam wrote “A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou” in his Rubaiyat, translated into English by Edward Fitz-Gerald in 1859.