Ten Americans have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature:
Sinclair Lewis (1930); Eugene O’Neill (1936); Pearl S. Buck (1938); William Faulkner (1949); Ernest Hemingway (1954); John Steinbeck (1962); Saul Bellow (1976); Isaac Bashevis Singer, a naturalized citizen (1978); Czeslaw Milosz, a naturalized citizen (1980); and Joseph Brodsky, a naturalized citizen (1987).
Mrs. Dalloway’s first name is Clarissa. Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway was published in 1925.
The opening line: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring…
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.
C. J. Koch’s The Year of Living Dangerously is set in 1965, the year of Suharto’s overthrow of Sukarno’s Indonesian government.
The Mongol emperor Kublai Khan (1215-1294) had a residence in K’ai-p’ing in southeastern Mongolia. Also known as Shang-Tu, this became Xanadu, the site of the emperor’s pleasure garden in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s unfinished poem “Kubla Khan” (1797).
Edward Stratemeyer, under the pseudonym Franklin W. Dixon created the Hardy Boys.