The first poem of Lyrical Ballads (1798) by Wordsworth and Coleridge in what many consider the founding work of English romanticism is Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
Daniel Defoe based The Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719-20) on the real-life story of Alexander Selkirk (1676-1721), a Scottish sailor who survived for more than four years on the desert island of Juan Fernandez off the Chilean coast. He became a celebrity after his rescue and homecoming in 1709.
The transatlantic flier and isolationist won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for his autobiography, The Spirit of St. Louis. The book was made into a movie starring James Stewart in 1957.
Clifford Odets wrote a play called Paradise Lost that was not based on Milton’s poem, in 1935. The play was about the fall of a middle-class family.
Unlike the 1988 film adaptation, in which Roy Hobbs wins the World Series with a pyrotechnic home run, Bernard Malamud’s original story The Natural has the slugger, preoccupied with sex and materialism, throw the final game of the World Series.
Hamartia is the fatal flaw that brings a good character to ruin. Hubris is pride, the classic example of hamartia.
Odysseus dies in the South Pole in Nikos Kazantzakis’s The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel.