Melville’s model of passive resistance Bartleby the Scrivener calmly replies to his boss, “I would prefer not to.”
The short story “Bartleby the Scrivener” was first published anonymously in Putnam’s Magazine in 1853.
Why Marry? by Jesse L. Williams won the first Pulitzer Prize in 1918.
The subtitle of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo is A Tale of the Seaboard.
The character Professor Henry Higgins in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion was based on a British scholar of phonetics and Old English named Henry Sweet. His works included History of English Sounds (1874).
The real name of the title character in The Deerslayer (1841) is Nathaniel (Natty) Bumppo. In other James Fenimore Cooper novels, he is also known as Hawkeye, Leather-stocking, La Longue Carabine, and Pathfinder.
The satire of America, called The Confidence Man, was the last work of Herman Melville published in his lifetime. It was published in 1857 to little public notice. Melville died in 1891.
Charles Perrault’s 1697 French version of the tale has Cinderella wearing glass (verre) slippers, but his sources gave her fur (vair) slippers. Perrault’s alteration may have been accidental.