Michel Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur (1735-1813), also known as J. Hector St. John, was born in France, emigrated to Canada, and in 1759, moved to New York.
He settled in Orange County, New York, where his years as a farmer led to his book, Letters from an American Farmer (1787).
He fled back to Europe during the American Revolution.
The group of writers and thinkers, the Bloomsbury Group, which included Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, and Lytton Strachey, among others, was named for the place where they held their meetings-46 Gordon Square, in Bloomsbury, London.
Although some biographers believe the story of Oz’s naming to be as fanciful as the tales themselves, author L. Frank Baum claimed that he was inspired by a file cabinet marked O–Z. Other suggested derivations include: a variation on Uz, Job’s house; a variation of children’s oh’s and ah’s; and a variation of Boz, the…
At the end of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1819), Washington Irving’s schoolmaster Ichabod Crane disappears after being hit by the Headless Horseman’s “head.”
Jonathan Swift first used the phrase “belles lettres” in Tatler 230 (1710): “The Traders in History and Politics, and the Belles Lettres.” In French the term means “beautiful letters, fine writing.” Swift added the pejorative connotation of light or trivial literature.
“Stella” was Esther Johnson, a woman Swift once tutored at the household of Sir William Temple in England. Swift’s letters to Johnson and her companion Rebecca Dingley, written from 1710 to 1713, are known as Journal to Stella.
The title character of the 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf is named Clarissa.