The title to the drug-induced stream-of-consciousness narrative Naked Lunch means a “frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork” and is repulsed by it.
The title was suggested to the author William Burroughs by Jack Kerouac.
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.
Edgar Allan Poe Roderick Usher, in “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839).
Francis Otto Matthiessen (1902-50) coined the phrase the “American Renaissance”, in his work The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941). The phrase refers to a time in the mid-nineteenth century that saw a flourishing of talent in American letters. Francis Otto Matthiessen (1902-50), in his work The American…
There were two sets of twins: Bert and Nan and their younger siblings, Freddie and Flossie. The series about them began with The Bobbsey Twins (1904) by Laura Lee Hope.
In the 1952 novel Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White, the first message Charlotte the spider writes in her web is “SOME PIG!”
Vladimir Nabokov wrote ten novels in Russian before turning to English, including Laughter in the Dark (1938). His first novel written in English was The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941). Nabokov (1899-1977) came to the United States in 1940 and was naturalized in 1945.