Unlike the 1988 film adaptation, in which Roy Hobbs wins the World Series with a pyrotechnic home run, Bernard Malamud’s original story The Natural has the slugger, preoccupied with sex and materialism, throw the final game of the World Series.
The full name of Antonia in Willa Cather’s novel My Antoniais is Antonia Shimerda, eldest daughter of a Bohemian family in Black Hawk, Nebraska.
A Confederacy of Dunces was published eleven years John Kennedy Toole’s death. Born in 1937, Toole finished his comic novel of New Orleans in 1963, but failed to find a publisher. He committed suicide in 1969. With the help of the novelist Walker Percy, his mother succeeded in getting the book published in 1980. Dunces…
The Augean stables that Hercules had to clean held 3,000 cattle and had not been cleaned in thirty years. Cleaning them was the sixth of Hercules’ seven labors. Hercules’ story was told by Ovid (43 B.c.-17 A.D.) and Apollodorus (first-second century A . D. ).
Yes, there a real Baron Miinchausen. Baron Karl Friedrich Hieronymus von Miinchausen (1720-1797), a German adventurer, is believed to have served in the Russian army against the Turks. He was known for exaggerating his exploits. Satirical stories about him were told by Rodolf Erich Raspe in Baron Miinchausen, Narrative of his Marvellous Travels (1785).
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 hero of William Faulkner’s Light in August is Joe Christmas. He was a man believed to be part black, who murders a white woman named Joanna Burden and is castrated and killed for it.