This quote is in none of Shakespeare’s plays.
In Hamlet, Act V, Scene 3, Hamlet says, “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio.”
For some reason the incorrect version is the one most people remember.
Jonathan Swift first used the phrase “belles lettres” in Tatler 230 (1710): “The Traders in History and Politics, and the Belles Lettres.” In French the term means “beautiful letters, fine writing.” Swift added the pejorative connotation of light or trivial literature.
Ernest Hemingway’s first book was Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923); it was published in France in a small edition. His first book published in the United States was In Our Time (1925), an expanded edition of the version published in France in 1924.
Twelfth-century Persian poet Omar Khayyam wrote “A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou” in his Rubaiyat, translated into English by Edward Fitz-Gerald in 1859.
“Mistah Kurtz—he dead,” from Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness is the quotation at the start of T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men”.
Oedipus is crushed by fate in Jean Cocteau’s tragedy The Infernal Machine.
The first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction was Edith Wharton (1862-1937) in 1921 for The Age of Innocence.