Joseph Conrad define his task as a writer as, “to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see!” in the preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897).
Bloomsday, the date on which James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is set, is June 16, 1904.
Mrs. Malaprop appeared in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1775 play The Rivals. She had a habit of misusing words in sentences like “I would by no means wish a daughter of mine to be a progeny of learning.” The character gave rise to the term malapropism.
The 1981 novel Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson is set in Fingerbone, Montana.
Ralph was the embattled elected leader in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.
Ethan Frome and his beloved, Mattie Silver, drive a sled into a tree in a botched suicide attempt in Edith Wharton’s novel, Ethan Frome.
Rioting started during the first performance of the comedy The Playboy of the Western World by J. M. Synge at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1907. The commotion was started by a reference to an undergarment.