Edgar Allan Poe invented detective C. Auguste Dupin, the coolly logical amateur sleuth of three stories published in the 1840s:
“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” and “The Purloined Letter.”
Writer George Henry Lewes (1817-78), who was officially married to another woman, Agnes, but unable to get a divorce, was George Eliot’s (1819-80) living companion. Eliot and Lewes lived together from 1854 until his death in 1878.
The epigraph for Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo is “So foul a sky clears not without a storm” (Shakespeare).
The first poem of Lyrical Ballads (1798) by Wordsworth and Coleridge in what many consider the founding work of English romanticism is Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
The poet laureate of England Tennyson sent the wreath to Victor Hugo’s funeral. The author of the novel Les Miserables (1862) was also a great lyric poet. His poetic works included Contemplations (1856).
Fyodor Dostoyevsky translated Eugenie Grandet (1833) into Russian. Dostoyevsky’s 1844 translation was his first publication.
Ernest Hemingway was married four times.