Washington Irving and fellow American writer John H. Payne were said to have competed for the affection of the author of Frankenstein during a visit to France from 1824 to 1826.
Mary’s husband Percy Shelley had died two years earlier.
Increase Mather(1639-1723) was the father of Cotton Mather(16631728). Both were clergymen, theologians, and prolific writers in Puritan New England.
The Castle of Otranto was inhabited by Manfred, the Prince of Otranto, with his family, in the 1764 Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole.
The first part of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls is recognized as a comic masterpiece, but the second part never saw the light of day. Convinced by the radical priest Father Matthew Konstantinovsky that literature was sinful, Gogol (1809-52) burned the manuscript of Part Two in 1852. He died a few days later.
William Ernest Henley (1849-1903) says “I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of my soul” in “Invictus.”
A crocodile ate Captain Hook’s hand, then followed him around the seas in search of more of him in James M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan.
Born in 1930, the French philosopher, critic, and founder of deconstructionism Jacques Derrida teaches at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. Born in 1930, the French philosopher, critic, and founder of deconstructionism teaches at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris.