The author of Gone With the Wind (1936) Margaret Mitchell died in 1949 at age forty-eight after being hit by a taxi in Atlanta.
The author of Gone With the Wind (1936) died in 1949
at age forty-eight after being hit by a taxi in Atlanta.
Sinbad the Sailor was an Iraqi, a merchant shipwrecked after setting sail from Basra, now Iraq. The story of his seven voyages is told in The Thousand and One Nights.
The names of the Brothers Grimm were Jacob Ludwig and Wilhelm Carl.
The first line of Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel is “Call me Smitty.” Through his narrator, Word Smith, Roth not only spoofs Melville, but Hawthorne, Twain, Hemingway, and all other writers who pursued the Great American Novel.
It is estimated that the first edition of one of the great American poems, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass sold no more than three dozen copies when it was first published in 1855.
Shangri-La, the setting for James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon supposedly has a real-life counterpart in Hunza, Pakistan. The community, which boasts of having the healthiest people in the world, many over 100 years old, is located at the borders of Pakistan, China, and the Soviet Union.
Beatrice was probably Beatrice Portinari, daughter of a noble Florentine family and wife of Simone de’ Bardi. She died at the age of twenty-four on June 8,1290, more than two decades before the Divine Comedy was completed. Dante fell in love with her when they were both children and dedicated most of his poetry to…