What book about the Holy Grail quest did T. S. Eliot draw upon in his poem, The Waste Land (1922)?

In James Thurber’s short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, mild-mannered Walter Mitty imagines that he is a Navy hydroplane commander flying through a howling storm.

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.

In the 1928 essay “a room of one’s own”, it refers to the space a woman needs to write fiction. Specifically, Woolf says that a woman needs two things to be able to write: “money and a room of her own.” The essay was drawn from two papers Woolf gave at the Arts Society at…

The author of the novels Song of Solomon (1977) and Beloved (1987) Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford.

Increase Mather(1639-1723) was the father of Cotton Mather(1663­1728). Both were clergymen, theologians, and prolific writers in Puritan New England.

Maud Gonne did not marry William Butler Yeats, the poet who made the actress famous through his poems of unrequited love. In 1903, after knowing Yeats for fourteen years, Gonne married Major John MacBride, an Irish revolutionary characterized by Yeats as a “drunken, vainglorious lout.” MacBride was executed for his role in the Easter Rebellion…