Thomas Hardy published his last novel thirty-three years before his death.
Hardy’s last novel was Jude the Obscure (1895), the story of Jude Fawley’s adulterous love for his cousin Sue Bridehead.
The novel so shocked readers that Hardy gave up writing fiction and turned to poetry. Hardy died in 1928.
Ogden Nash wrote the ditty in 1931. In 1968, he updated it: Candy is dandy But liquor is quicker. Pot is not.
The first book printed in English is The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, a prose romance by Raoul Lefevre, printed by William Caxton in 1474 in Bruges, Belgium. Caxton himself translated it from the French. Caxton also printed the first dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, published on November…
The longest-running play in theater history is The Mousetrap (1952) by Agatha Christie, which has never closed on the British stage. It was adapted from one of Christie’s stories.
Mexico’s best-known author Carlos Fuentes (The Death of Artemio Cruz, 1962; The Old Gringo, 1985) first began writing in English, but has since switched to his native language, Spanish.
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 author of Naked Lunch (1959) William Burroughs unsuccessfully attempted to shoot a glass off his wife’s head.