The rainbow in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is the arc a rocket makes from launch to target.
The novel is set in World War II Europe at the time German V-2 rockets were falling on London.
The full title of Dickens’s David Copperfield is The Personal History, Experience and Observations of David Copperfield the Younger, of Blunderstone Rookery, Which He Never Meant To Be Published On Any Account.
Edward Alleyn played Doctor Faustus in the original production of Christopher Marlowe’s tragedy, circa 1589. Alleyn also played the lead in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (1587).
The unhappy Werther’s beloved in Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther is Lotte.
Judas received thirty pieces of silver for betraying Christ. In Matthew’s Gospel, Judas throws away the money and hangs himself after the betrayal.
Bo Weinberg, Dutch Schultz’s former henchman is killed at the beginning of E. L. Doctorow’s novel Billy Bathgate. By Schultz’s orders, he is thrown off a ship with his feet encased in cement.
In The Iliad (ninth century B.C.), Venus is Aeneas’s mother?