Will Durant was twelve years older than Ariel Durant.
The authors of the multivolume series The Story of Civilization (1935-67) were married in New York City in 1913, when he was twenty-seven and she was fifteen.
The title character of the 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf is named Clarissa.
Lewis Carroll’s books are said to have been written for a friend, Alice Liddell. Liddell, with three other children on an 1862 boating trip, inspired the first of the stories, which Carroll initially called Alice’s Adventures Underground. The book, with additional tales as well as illustrations, was published in 1865, followed in 1871 by Through…
John Donne (1572?-1631) wrote, “Go and catch a falling star,/Get with child a mandrake root”, in the opening lines to the poem, “Song,” which was published posthumously, in 1633.
Margaret Mitchell’s 1937 Pulitzer Prize winner Gone with the Wind has been translated into 27 languages and has sold over 20 million copies.
The annual prize for poetry, the Bollingen Prize, was first awarded in 1949 to Ezra Pound for his Pisan Cantos (1948).
Considered the oldest full novel in the world, The Tale of Genji was written in Japan toward the start of the eleventh century.