Joseph Conrad make the journey down the Congo River in 1890, aboard the Roi des Beiges and it became the basis for Heart of Darkness.
Conrad took over as ship master when the captain fell ill of tropical fever.
Zora Neale Hurston was a folklorist who studied with anthropologist Franz Boas at Barnard College before becoming a novelist. In Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938), she compiled black traditions of the South and the Caribbean. Her novels include Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).
The Japanese novel The Tale of Genji was written by court lady Murasaki Shikibu around 1000. It was first translated into English by Arthur Waley in 1925-33. It is widely thought of as the world’s first novel. This Japanese novel was written by court lady Murasaki Shikibu around 1000. It was first translated
The main character in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is Humphrey Chimpden Ear-wicker, a pubkeeper in Dublin who is trying to live down an undisclosed crime he committed against a young woman (or man) in the park. Earwicker is also known as Here Comes Everybody and Haveth Childer Everywhere, and is linked with Adam, Jesus Christ,…
After Rebecca West’s review of H. G. Wells’s book, Marriage, in 1912, they met and began their ten-year relationship. Their son, Anthony West, born in 1914, became a novelist and critic in his own right.
Thomas Paine wrote “These are the times that try men’s souls” in “The American Crisis,” a series of pamphlets he published between 1776 and 1783. When he wrote the opening sentence to the first pamphlet, the Revolutionary army had just retreated across New Jersey and defeat seemed imminent.
In the 1970s, the author of Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) Julian Barnes wrote the “Edward Pygge” gossip column for the British periodical, The New Review.