George Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess is based on Porgy (1925), by Du Bose Heyward.
Heyward and his wife, Dorothy, won a Pulitzer prize for their dramatic version of the novel.
Porgy is a crippled beggar and gambler who lives on Catfish Row in Charleston, South Carolina. Bess is his drug-addicted mistress.
Henry James created Roderick Hudson, in the 1876 novel of the same name.
Bluebeard, the title character of Charles Perrault’s story “Barbebleue” (1697) kills his wives for looking into the locked room where he stores the corpses of other disobedient wives. His final wife, however, escapes Bluebeard’s punishment.
The Oberammergau Passion Play is said to have originated in 1633, when the people of this village in Upper Bavaria vowed to stage it in order to be rescued from the plague. The play depicting Christ’s passion is performed every tenth year. It is said to have originated in 1633, when the people of this…
Robert Herrick said, “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may”, in the first line of the 1648 poem “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.”
It was not Mark Twain who said the phrase. The quote first appeared in an editorial in the Hartford Courant of August 24, 1897, probably written by associate editor Charles Dudley Warner. Warner had collaborated with Twain on The Gilded Age (1873).
Shangri-La, the setting for James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon supposedly has a real-life counterpart in Hunza, Pakistan. The community, which boasts of having the healthiest people in the world, many over 100 years old, is located at the borders of Pakistan, China, and the Soviet Union.