Two hundred and forty-four deceased inhabitants of Spoon River recite their verse epitaphs in Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology.
The most complete treatment is the Argonautica by third-century poet Apollonius of Rhodes.
The German-born author of Siddhartha (1922) and Steppenwolf (1927) Hermann Hesse became a Swiss citizen at the outbreak of World War I. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946.
Hesiod, the reputed author of the Theogony, the oldest surviving account of the origin of the Greek gods, was a poor Boeotian farmer of the eighth century B.C. His Works and Days gives advice on fanning and moral life.
Charlotte Bronte’s close friend, novelist Elizabeth Gaskell wrote The Life of Charlotte Bronte. The two met in 1850; Bronte died five years later.
Northrop Frye’s first book was Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (1947). The influential scholar is best known for his Anatomy of Criticism (1957), in which he introduced a critical system based on analysis of literary archetypes.
Dr. Faustus, the scholar who sells his soul to Satan is torn apart by devils at the end of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus.