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. ).
While James I granted a pension to Ben Jonson in 1616, it was not until 1668 that the laureateship was created as a royal office. John Dryden (1631-1700) was appointed by Charles II and held the office until 1688, when he was stripped of the laureateship by William and Mary because he had become a…
Aphra Behn (1640-89), author of the play The Rover (1677) and the novel Oroonoko (1688). She wrote under the pseudonym Astrea.
The name of Rochester’s house in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is Thornfield Hall.
According to Aristotle, intuition and harmony leads a writer to create. In the Poetics (335-322 B.c.), he writes: “[T]he instinct of intuition is implanted in man from childhood . . . and through intuition he learns his earliest lessons. . . . Next there is the instinct for ‘harmony’ and rhythm, meters being manifestly sections…
Norman Mailer has been married six times.
Washington Irving and fellow American writer John H. Payne were said to have competed for the affection of the author of Frankenstein during a visit to France from 1824 to 1826. Mary’s husband Percy Shelley had died two years earlier.