The title of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars refers to the banner of the Irish Citizens Army, of which O’Casey was once a member.
The play concerns members of the army before and during the Easter Rising in 1916.
Gwendolyn Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize in Literature in 1950, for Annie Allen.
The German-born author of Siddhartha (1922) and Steppenwolf (1927) Hermann Hesse became a Swiss citizen at the outbreak of World War I. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946.
The Trojan priest Laocoon who was killed by sea serpents is a character in Vergil’s Aeneid (c. 19 B.C.).
Roland and Orlando are the same character. Roland, knight of Charlemagne’s court, is the hero of The Song of Roland, an eleventh-century French epic. Orlando is the Italian form of Roland’s name; he appears in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1532).
The leader of the intellectual group the “New Humanists” which, during the flowering of modernism, tried to spur interest in the classics, was Irving Babbitt, professor of romance languages at Harvard from 1894 to 1933.
The young man Cheri is having an affair with is the aging courtesan Leonie Vallon, more commonly known as Lea de Lonval, or just Lea, in Colette’s Cheri.