The story “Wedding Preparations in the Country” (1907) by Franz Kafka seems to directly foreshadow Gregor Samsa’s plight, as a train passenger lying in bed imagines himself as a giant bug.
In H. G. Wells’s novel, the name of the Invisible Man was Griffin. The Invisible Man was published in 1897. Griffin remains invisible until he is dying.
Kate Chopin was born Kate O’Flaherty (1851-1904) in St. Louis, Missouri, to an Irish father and French mother. Her married name came from her husband, Oscar Chopin. Her fiction includes the novel The Awakening (1899).
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were three Jews who were thrown into a fiery furnace by order of King Nebuchadnezzar in chapter 3 of the Old Testament Book of Daniel, as punishment for refusing to worship a golden idol. God saved them, however, allowing them to walk through the fire unharmed.
The title to the drug-induced stream-of-consciousness narrative Naked Lunch means a “frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork” and is repulsed by it. The title was suggested to the author William Burroughs by Jack Kerouac.
In the novel My Friend Flicka by Mary O’Hara, Flicka, a half-wild filly, is the friend of ten-year-old Ken McLaughlin in Wyoming.
Jeeves’s boss was Bertie Wooster, a young man-about-town in P. G. Wodehouse’s stories beginning with My Man Jeeves (1919). Jeeves was his valet.