The play, Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw ends with Eliza Doolittle asserting her humanity and rejecting Henry Higgins.
But the 1938 movie ending, approved by Shaw, brought the pair together.
The musical version, My Fair Lady (1956), also had a happy ending.
Moliere’s real name was Jean Baptiste Poquelin. Among the French playwright’s works are Tartuffe (1664) and The Misanthrope (1666).
Henry Fielding summoned poet laureate Colley Cibber to court in 1740 for the murder of the English language. Fielding issued the summons under the pseudonym “Captain Hercules Vinegar.”
Ethan Frome and his beloved, Mattie Silver, drive a sled into a tree in a botched suicide attempt in Edith Wharton’s novel, Ethan Frome.
In the 1898 essay “What is Art?” Leo Tolstoy defines art as: “a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them.”
Bo Weinberg, Dutch Schultz’s former henchman is killed at the beginning of E. L. Doctorow’s novel Billy Bathgate. By Schultz’s orders, he is thrown off a ship with his feet encased in cement.
The name of the lover in D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was Oliver Mellors, gamekeeper for Lady Chatterley’s husband.