The Koran existed first in oral form as a series of revelations recited by the prophet Muhammad (570-632), founder of Islam.
His followers wrote down or committed to memory the individual surahs, or chapters, but these were not collected in authoritative form until about 650.
William Butler Yeats’ epitaph that he wrote for himself was: “Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by!” The epitaph appears on Yeats’s tombstone in Drum-cliff churchyard under a mountain called Ben Bulben in County Sligo, Ireland, just as Yeats wrote in his poem “Under Ben Bulben” (1939).
Rioting started during the first performance of the comedy The Playboy of the Western World by J. M. Synge at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1907. The commotion was started by a reference to an undergarment.
Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848) is subtitled “A Novel Without a Hero”.
Thomas Hardy published his last novel thirty-three years before his death. Hardy’s last novel was Jude the Obscure (1895), the story of Jude Fawley’s adulterous love for his cousin Sue Bridehead. The novel so shocked readers that Hardy gave up writing fiction and turned to poetry. Hardy died in 1928.
In 1897, Mark Twain was in seclusion, grieving over a death in the family, when a sensationalistic newspaper reported that he had died impoverished in London. When a reporter appeared at Twain’s home, the writer read a prepared statement containing the famous line “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”.
Margaret Mitchell’s 1937 Pulitzer Prize winner Gone with the Wind has been translated into 27 languages and has sold over 20 million copies.