Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde didn’t exist, but there was a Scottish cabinetmaker named William Brodie who inspired Robert Louis Stevenson’s story.
Brodie, a respected businessman by day, wore a mask and led a gang of robbers by night. Born in 1741, Brodie was hanged in 1788.
The story interested Stevenson and inspired The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886).
Pamela’s last name in Samuel Richard-son’s Pamela was Andrews.
Thoreau lived in his hut at Walden Pond for two years from 1845 to 1847. His account of the experience, Walden, or Life in the Woods, appeared in 1854.
For nearly ten years the short story writer Guy de Maupassant apprenticed himself to Flaubert to learn to write fiction.
The German word for “overman” or “superperson” first appears in Goethe’s Faust (1808,1833), referring to an extraordinarily gifted person. Nietzsche used the term iibermensch for his transcendent man in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-91). The Nazis adopted the term as part of their doctrine of Aryan supremacy.
The author of The Red Badge of Courage (1895), Stephen Crane was born in 1871, six years after the end of the Civil War. He died in 1900.
The title to the drug-induced stream-of-consciousness narrative Naked Lunch means a “frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork” and is repulsed by it. The title was suggested to the author William Burroughs by Jack Kerouac.