Bo Weinberg, Dutch Schultz’s former henchman is killed at the beginning of E. L. Doctorow’s novel Billy Bathgate.
By Schultz’s orders, he is thrown off a ship with his feet encased in cement.
These lines from Section 27, Stanza 4 of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem In Memoriam lament the loss of Tennyson’s close friend Arthur Hallam, who died at twenty-two.
Pulitzer Prize judges and trustees were divided so sharply over Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow that for only the seventh time in Pulitzer history no award was given.
Jay Gatsby was supposed to have gone to Oxford. In Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) the gangster Wolfsheim said Gatsby was an “Oggsford” man.
Henry James created Roderick Hudson, in the 1876 novel of the same name.
In the Paradiso (1321), the highest of Dante’s heavens is the Empyrean, the tenth heaven. It contains God’s Court, seen as a many-petaled rose.
Edgar Allan Poe’s epitaph was “Quoth the Raven nevermore,” from his poem “The Raven” (1845).