The title of O. Henry’s short story collection The Four Million refers to two things: it represents the population of New York City at the time, and it is an answer to Ward McAllister, who said “there are only about 400 people in New York society.”
The collection contains the 1902 story, “The Gift of the Magi.”
In The Winter’s Tale, Act III, Scene 3. Antigonus, a lord of Sicilia, runs for his life after hearing “A savage clamor!” He doesn’t make it; his death is reported later in the scene.
Odysseus descends into the underworld in Book XI of XXIV of Homer’s Odyssey .
Famed for her shrewishness, the wife of the fifth-century B.C. Athenian philosopher Socrates was named Xantippe.
The source of the title of Thomas Wolfe’s novel Look Homeward, Angel (1929) was John Milton’s poem “Lycidas” (1637). Milton asks his dead friend, now an angel, to look back compassionately on his still-living friends: Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth: And, 0 ye dolphins, waft the hapless youth.
Aphra Behn (1640-89), author of the play The Rover (1677) and the novel Oroonoko (1688). She wrote under the pseudonym Astrea.
Ernest Hemingway won one Pulitzer prize, for The Old Man and the Sea (1952).