The name of the minor-league team in Mark Harris’s Bang the Drum Slowly is The New York Mammoths.
The novel’s narrator is Henry Wiggen, star pitcher for the Mammoths.
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.”
One of the earliest and most influential American magazine editors, Sarah Josepha Hale wrote “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in 1830. In addition to founding the first national women’s magazine, Godey’s Ladies’Magazine, and successfully campaigning to make Thanksgiving a national holiday, she was inspired to write the rhyme by an actual case of a child’s…
The retarded narrator of the first section of the Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury is thirty-three years old. Faulkner asked that Benjy’s stream of consciousness be printed in eight different colors of type to better express the layers of Benjy’s memory. The request was not granted.
The Augean stables that Hercules had to clean held 3,000 cattle and had not been cleaned in thirty years. Cleaning them was the sixth of Hercules’ seven labors. Hercules’ story was told by Ovid (43 B.c.-17 A.D.) and Apollodorus (first-second century A . D. ).
The subtitle of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death.
Anne Tyler’s first novel was If Morning Ever Comes (1965), written in her early twenties. Born in 1941, Tyler was respected by critics but did not become widely known until Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant in 1982.