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.
Ten Americans have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature: Sinclair Lewis (1930); Eugene O’Neill (1936); Pearl S. Buck (1938); William Faulkner (1949); Ernest Hemingway (1954); John Steinbeck (1962); Saul Bellow (1976); Isaac Bashevis Singer, a naturalized citizen (1978); Czeslaw Milosz, a naturalized citizen (1980); and Joseph Brodsky, a naturalized citizen (1987).
“Jesus H. Christ” is the first line of Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and the first of many profanities in Albee’s look into a destructive marriage. A London production changed the first line to “Mary H. Magdalen.” “Jesus H. Christ” is the first line of the play, and the first of many…
These romances about life in Scotland were published anonymously by Sir Walter Scott under the credit “the author of Waverley.” The first book, Waverley, appeared in 1814 and helped to shift Scott’s career from poetry to fiction. The Waverley novels include: Guy Mannering (1815) Old Mortality (1816) Rob Roy (1818) The Heart of Midlothian (1818)…
Critics Carl and Mark Van Doren related were brothers. Both were members of the faculty of Columbia University, Carl from 1911 to 1930, Mark from 1920 to 1959.
Scylla, a female six-headed monster, captured sailors and ate them. Charybdis was a whirlpool (or a creator of whirlpools) that swallowed ships. The two creatures lay in wait on either side of the Straits of Messina between Italy and Sicily. Their story is told in Homer’s Odyssey (ninth century B.C.).
Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote “Water, Water, everywhere/Nor any drop to drink” in his poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798). The lines are often misquoted as “and not a drop to drink.”