After Rebecca West’s review of H. G. Wells’s book, Marriage, in 1912, they met and began their ten-year relationship.
Their son, Anthony West, born in 1914, became a novelist and critic in his own right.
The first and middle names of the twentieth-century English critic I.A. Richards are Ivor Armstrong.
Subtle is the name of the shady character in the 1610 play The Alchemist by Ben Jonson. He works with two other unsavory characters, Face (a.k.a. Jeremy) and Dol Common.
The story “Wedding Preparations in the Country” (1907) by Franz Kafka seems to directly foreshadow Gregor Samsa’s plight, as a train passenger lying in bed imagines himself as a giant bug.
A bildungsroman (in German, it means “education novel”) deals with the formation of a young person and includes common coming-of-age stories. James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) is an example. A roman a clef (in French, it means a “novel with a key”) contains one or more characters or situations…
Ohio-born writer Earl Derr Biggers invented the portly Honolulu detective Charlie Chan. The first book about Chan was The House Without a Key (1925).
Hans Christian Andersen’s first novel The Improvisatore was published in 1835. Later the same year, Andersen published Tales Told for Children, which included well-known tales as well as an original story, “Little Ida’s Flowers.”