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.
Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis are father and son. Kingsley Amis’s books include Lucky Jim (1954) and Jake’s Thing (1978); Martin Amis’s novels include Success (1978) and Money (1984).
The title of Francis Bacon’s 1620 philosophical treatise Novum Organum means literally “new instrument.” It alludes to Aristotle’s treatise on logic and the theory of science, commonly known as the Organon.
Bloomsday, the date on which James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) is set, is June 16, 1904.
Roland and Orlando are the same character. Roland, knight of Charlemagne’s court, is the hero of The Song of Roland, an eleventh-century French epic. Orlando is the Italian form of Roland’s name; he appears in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1532).
Two hundred and forty-four deceased inhabitants of Spoon River recite their verse epitaphs in Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology.
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.