What was George Orwell’s real name?

The glazier Heurtebise (literally “break wind”) aids the poet Orphee in rescuing his wife from Death. Cocteau has written that the name of Heurtebise in the play Orphee was revealed to him in an opium-induced vision. The name obsessed Cocteau to the point that he thought another being was living inside him.

Sam Shepard’s first play was The Tooth of Crime (1973). His later plays include Buried Child (1979) and True West (1980).

Edward Stratemeyer created Nancy Drew, under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene. The prolific author died in 1930.

Hazel Motes founded the Church Without Christ in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, “where the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way.” A charlatan named Onnie Jay Holy started a rival sect, the Holy Church of Christ Without Christ.

The only scenery in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is a tree, leafless in Act 1, and with leaves in Act 2.

The alienated artist never discovered food that he enjoyed, so he starves to death in Franz Kafka’s short story “The Hunger Artist.”