An American Tragedy was a 1925 novel by Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945).
It was based on the murder of the pregnant Grace Brown by her boyfriend, social climber Chester Gillette, at Big Moose Lake in the Adirondacks in 1906.
“Well, let’s get on with it. . . .” is the last line of Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit. It is spoken by Garcia when he realizes he is facing eternity.
The Mongol emperor Kublai Khan (1215-1294) had a residence in K’ai-p’ing in southeastern Mongolia. Also known as Shang-Tu, this became Xanadu, the site of the emperor’s pleasure garden in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s unfinished poem “Kubla Khan” (1797).
Agamemnon, commander-in-chief of the Greek armies at Troy, is forced to return a captive woman named Chryseis in order to stop a pestilence sent by the god Apollo at the beginning of Homer’s The Iliad. Agamemnon demands Achilles’ captive Briseis in exchange. Achilles, in anger, refuses to fight for the Greeks any longer.
The full title Of The Pickwick Papers is The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.
The full name of Antonia in Willa Cather’s novel My Antoniais is Antonia Shimerda, eldest daughter of a Bohemian family in Black Hawk, Nebraska.
Four years separated the publication of Milton’s Paradise Lost and its sequel, Paradise Regained. The first was published in 1667, the latter in 1671.