The first part of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls is recognized as a comic masterpiece, but the second part never saw the light of day.
Convinced by the radical priest Father Matthew Konstantinovsky that literature was sinful, Gogol (1809-52) burned the manuscript of Part Two in 1852.
He died a few days later.
The first book published by Dr. Seuss was And to Think I Saw It on Mulberry Street. It was published in 1937 by Vanguard Press, after being rejected by twenty-three other publishers.
Joseph Conrad make the journey down the Congo River in 1890, aboard the Roi des Beiges and it became the basis for Heart of Darkness. Conrad took over as ship master when the captain fell ill of tropical fever.
The 1941 Broadway play Arsenic and Old Lace was written by Joseph Kesselring. The 1946 movie adaptation was directed by Frank Capra.
The Hemingway novel The Garden of Eden, was published posthumously by Scribners in 1986.
Longinus’s critical treatise On the Sublime was not published in Europe until 1554. The first-century essay was then translated into several languages and gained wide prominence, eventually influencing the poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Greek tragic actors wore “buskins,” boots that reached halfway up the calf and had thick soles to make the actors seem taller. The Greek word for the boot was cothurnus. “Buskin” first appeared as the English term in the sixteenth century.