“Jesus H. Christ” is the first line of Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and the first of many profanities in Albee’s look into a destructive marriage.
A London production changed the first line to “Mary H. Magdalen.”
“Jesus H. Christ” is the first line of the play, and the
first of many profanities in Albee’s look into a de-
Critics Carl and Mark Van Doren related were brothers. Both were members of the faculty of Columbia University, Carl from 1911 to 1930, Mark from 1920 to 1959.
Thomas Paine wrote “These are the times that try men’s souls” in “The American Crisis,” a series of pamphlets he published between 1776 and 1783. When he wrote the opening sentence to the first pamphlet, the Revolutionary army had just retreated across New Jersey and defeat seemed imminent.
At the end of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1819), Washington Irving’s schoolmaster Ichabod Crane disappears after being hit by the Headless Horseman’s “head.”
Orson Welles’s 1942 movie The Magnificent Ambersons was based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Booth Tarkington. Tarkington also won a Pulitzer for the novel Alice Adams (1921).
The rest of the nursery rhyme from which Ken Kesey took the title for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is: Wire, briar, limber, lock, Three geese in a flock, One flew East, one flew West, One flew over the cuckoo’s nest.
The original title of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake was Work in Progress during the seventeen years of its composition (1922-39). Parts of it were published under that title before the work was completed.