Shakespeare’s Sonnets , (1609) contains 154 sonnets.
The poems fall into two main groups:
Numbers 1 to 126 are addressed to a young male friend;
numbers 127 to 152 are addressed to a mysterious “dark lady.”
Sonnets 153 and 154, adaptations of a Greek epigram, don’t fit into either of the two categories.
Beatrice was probably Beatrice Portinari, daughter of a noble Florentine family and wife of Simone de’ Bardi. She died at the age of twenty-four on June 8,1290, more than two decades before the Divine Comedy was completed. Dante fell in love with her when they were both children and dedicated most of his poetry to…
Michel Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur (1735-1813), also known as J. Hector St. John, was born in France, emigrated to Canada, and in 1759, moved to New York. He settled in Orange County, New York, where his years as a farmer led to his book, Letters from an American Farmer (1787). He fled back to Europe…
The hero of Richard Wright’s Native Son is Bigger Thomas, a black man from Chicago who murders a white woman and is executed for it.
Melville’s novels of the South Seas were published in this order: Typee in 1846, Omoo in 1847
The book describes the epidemic of bubonic plague that ravaged England in 1665. Defoe’s fictionalized account was published in 1722. Defoe himself was only five years old when the plague hit London.
The young man Cheri is having an affair with is the aging courtesan Leonie Vallon, more commonly known as Lea de Lonval, or just Lea, in Colette’s Cheri.