The original title of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake was Work in Progress during the seventeen years of its composition (1922-39).
Parts of it were published under that title before the work was completed.
The author of Naked Lunch (1959) William Burroughs unsuccessfully attempted to shoot a glass off his wife’s head.
Ethan Frome and his beloved, Mattie Silver, drive a sled into a tree in a botched suicide attempt in Edith Wharton’s novel, Ethan Frome.
The subtitle of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo is A Tale of the Seaboard.
Captain Ahab’s first mate in Melville’s MobyDick is Starbuck, the second is Stubb, the third is Flask.
The classical writer who was the first to record the story about the runner who ran from Marathon to Athens, and then died was Lucian of Samosata, a writer of satirical essays of the second century A.D. Where he got the story is unknown. He claimed that Philippides (also known as Pheidippides) ran about twenty-five…
The series of seven children’s books by C. S. Lewis started in 1950 with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and continued with Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair, The Magician’s Nephew, The Horse and His Boy, and The Last Battle.