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.
Considered the oldest full novel in the world, The Tale of Genji was written in Japan toward the start of the eleventh century.
Oedipus is crushed by fate in Jean Cocteau’s tragedy The Infernal Machine.
C. K. Scott Moncrieff took the title Remembrance of Things Past for his 1922 English translation of Proust from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30: “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/I summon up remembrance of things past.” The literal translation of Proust’s title is “In Search of Lost Time.”
Emerson’s idea of “the soul of the whole” appeared first in the essay, “The Over-Soul,” included in his First Series (1841).
The source of the title The Catcher in the Rye is a reference to Robert Burns’s poem “Comin’ Through the Rye” (1792), which Holden Caulfield quotes.
Alexander Pope’s expression of charity, “To err is human, to forgive divine” appears in An Essay on Criticism (1711).