These romances about life in Scotland were published anonymously by Sir Walter Scott under the credit “the author of Waverley.” The first book, Waverley, appeared in 1814 and helped to shift Scott’s career from poetry to fiction. The Waverley novels include:
Guy Mannering (1815)
Old Mortality (1816)
Rob Roy (1818)
The Heart of Midlothian (1818)
The Bride of Lammermoor (1819)
Jessica Tandy first played Blanche DuBois in the first production of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, opposite Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski.
In Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952), Santiago catches a marlin.
The rest of the nursery rhyme from which Ken Kesey took the title for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is: Wire, briar, limber, lock, Three geese in a flock, One flew East, one flew West, One flew over the cuckoo’s nest.
Robert Browning (1812-89) and Elizabeth Barrett (1806-61) had to marry secretly because Barrett’s father refused to let his children marry, even though Elizabeth was forty at the time. The secret wedding took place at London’s St. Marylebone Church on September 12, 1846. (Browning was thirty-four.) They lived in Florence for fifteen happy years until her…
The novel of attempted suicide and recovery The Bell Jail was written by Sylvia Plath, but was first published under the pseudonym of Victoria Lucas in 1963. It did not appear under the author’s name until 1966.
William Butler Yeats’ epitaph that he wrote for himself was: “Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by!” The epitaph appears on Yeats’s tombstone in Drum-cliff churchyard under a mountain called Ben Bulben in County Sligo, Ireland, just as Yeats wrote in his poem “Under Ben Bulben” (1939).