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.
The title of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars refers to the banner of the Irish Citizens Army, of which O’Casey was once a member. The play concerns members of the army before and during the Easter Rising in 1916.
“Udolpho” in Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho was the castle of the evil Montoni in the Italian Apennines, and site of many scary events.
Aegisthus was Clytemnestra’s lover in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. He conspired with Clytemnestra to kill her husband, Agamemnon.
The novel The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker tells the story of a single lunch hour. Much of the book focuses on an escalator ride.
Italian author Carlo Collodi (a.k.a. Carlo Lorenzini) wrote The Adventures of Pinocchio, the popular tale of a puppet who comes to life.
Ernest Hemingway’s first book was Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923); it was published in France in a small edition. His first book published in the United States was In Our Time (1925), an expanded edition of the version published in France in 1924.