The novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez tells the story of seven generations of the Buendia family in the village of Macondo.
Bo Weinberg, Dutch Schultz’s former henchman is killed at the beginning of E. L. Doctorow’s novel Billy Bathgate. By Schultz’s orders, he is thrown off a ship with his feet encased in cement.
The first line of Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel is “Call me Smitty.” Through his narrator, Word Smith, Roth not only spoofs Melville, but Hawthorne, Twain, Hemingway, and all other writers who pursued the Great American Novel.
In The Iliad (ninth century B.C.), Zeus is Helen’s father?
Two hundred and forty-four deceased inhabitants of Spoon River recite their verse epitaphs in Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology.
Oedipus is crushed by fate in Jean Cocteau’s tragedy The Infernal Machine.
The second movie mentioned by name in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer (1961) is The Third Man (1949), directed by Carol Reed.