In Robert Browning’s poem, “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (1855), Childe Roland is a knight errant in search of the Dark Tower.
When he reaches it he blows his horn, the poem ends.
The title comes from a piece of a song in Shakespeare’s King Lear (act 3, scene 4).
According to Aristotle, intuition and harmony leads a writer to create. In the Poetics (335-322 B.c.), he writes: “[T]he instinct of intuition is implanted in man from childhood . . . and through intuition he learns his earliest lessons. . . . Next there is the instinct for ‘harmony’ and rhythm, meters being manifestly sections…
An American Tragedy was a 1925 novel by Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945). It was based on the murder of the pregnant Grace Brown by her boyfriend, social climber Chester Gillette, at Big Moose Lake in the Adirondacks in 1906.
Norman Mailer has been married six times.
The name of the little boy who goes to the country of the Wild Things in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are is Max.
Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (c. 1851) ends with: “And we are here as on a darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/Where ignorant armies clash by night”.
Kugelmass has an affair with Emma Bovary in Woody Allen’s short story “The Kugelmass Episode”. The Great Persky projects the bored professor into Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856) and Emma Bovary into modern Manhattan.