Hesiod, the reputed author of the Theogony, the oldest surviving account of the origin of the Greek gods, was a poor Boeotian farmer of the eighth century B.C.
His Works and Days gives advice on fanning and moral life.
Mexico’s best-known author Carlos Fuentes (The Death of Artemio Cruz, 1962; The Old Gringo, 1985) first began writing in English, but has since switched to his native language, Spanish.
The “Glad Girl” was Pollyanna, in the eponymous 1913 novel by Eleanor Hodgman Porter. She also appeared in the 1915 sequel, Pollyanna Grows Up.
Antigone’s two brothers are Eteocles and Polyneices. Both are dead when the play opens, but Creon forbids the burial of Polyneices, who had rebelled against Creon’s rule. Antigone gives him a token burial anyway. Antigone also has a sister, Ismene.
English was not spoken in England until 449, when three Germanic tribes from Denmark, the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons, invaded Britain. The Angles, who settled along the east coast of north and central England, developed literate culture and gave their name to the country (Angle-land, England). The language of these tribes, Anglo-Saxon or Old English,…
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…
The retarded narrator of the first section of the Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury is thirty-three years old. Faulkner asked that Benjy’s stream of consciousness be printed in eight different colors of type to better express the layers of Benjy’s memory. The request was not granted.